Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(59)
She lifted the teapot and tilted it over her cup, but it was empty. She set it down and pushed out of the booth. ‘Let’s go back,’ she said to Brunetti, then she went over to the counter and exchanged a few words with Bamba while paying their bill. Unlike his employer, Sergio, the Senegalese barman rang up the correct sum and gave the receipt to Griffoni: Sergio was more likely to take the cash, say thank you, and not bother giving a receipt, the older man being of a mind that any member of the Guardia di Finanza lurking outside would hesitate to stop and question a police officer about whether he’d been given the slip of paper that proved he had paid the bill and thus the tax on it.
Brunetti stopped and asked Bamba how his wife and daughter were and was informed that his daughter Pauline had the best marks in her class in mathematics and geography, and his wife went in three mornings a week to clean the homes of two old people in their building.
‘Good, that you’re all busy,’ Brunetti said.
Griffoni added, ‘And good that you’re all here.’
Bamba smiled at her and made as if to touch her arm, but stopped and set his hand on the counter. ‘Thank you, Dottoressa,’ he said, giving her a look Brunetti had never seen in Bamba’s eyes.
He had no idea what strings Griffoni had managed to pull with her friends in Rome, but the immigration office, after sitting for some years on Bamba’s application for permission to have his wife and daughter join him, had granted the request within two months of the conversation a weeping Bamba had had with Griffoni the day after his last appointment with the immigration office.
Brunetti had once asked her what she’d done to hurry things along, and she had categorically denied having interfered in what she called, ‘the slow grinding down of hope,’ a phrase she often used to describe the function of the bureaucracy of the Ministry of the Interior charged with processing requests for immigration. They were silent on their way back to the Questura.
21
When he approached the Ospedale dell’Angelo, Brunetti was struck by its resemblance to a cruise ship becalmed in a soccer field. From a distance, a glass wall appeared: six, seven floors high, seeming to slant backwards as they rose. The ends had an unsettling resemblance to the prows of the massive ships that once plied the waters in front of San Marco, occasionally crashing into the riva or coming close enough to fill the front page of the Gazzettino for days.
Brunetti approached the shape with a certain timidity, as though, as soon as he stepped aboard, it would break free of its moorings and set off, giving in to some atavistic desire to slide itself into the laguna and, like the frog in the fairy tale, be transformed by the kiss of the water back into its true, princely self.
He freed himself from these fantasies and went to the Information desk, where a young man at a computer quickly found Signorina Watson’s name, gave him the floor and room number, and told him the elevators were to his left.
Brunetti hardly needed to be told, for he saw signs and arrows pointing to the different clinics and wards. It would be, he realized, difficult to become lost; how different from the old, comfortable, confusing Ospedale Civile in the city, with buildings spread out in no apparent pattern and many signs contradictory or confusing. Instead of the many-pillared cloister with its dozing cats, Ospedale dell’Angelo had pathways threading through what appeared to be a rainforest and an almost palpable cleanliness about everything that met the eye.
He arrived quickly at the third floor and, after showing his warrant card to the nurse at the desk, asked where he would find Mr. Watson and his daughter. He followed her directions to the room. The door was open, so he stopped there and looked inside. Two beds, the near one empty, a man sitting on the opposite side of the other bed. He might have been Brunetti’s age, but he had gained more weight and lost more hair getting there. His bulk put the chair at possible risk of collapse: he was deeply intent on the phone he held in his hand, fingers tapping out a message. What was it? ‘Come and save my daughter’?
Brunetti’s glance moved to the small figure lying under the blankets. In the centre of the face, a white plastic triangle was taped over her nose. Another tape ran the length of her left eyebrow: one perpendicular strip of tape secured it under the plastic covering, another anchored it to her forehead. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. The skin above and below her left eye was almost black, radiating out to a circle of yellow, and some swelling remained. Her lips were open and pink.
A transparent plastic bag hung suspended from a metal rack, and from it, a pale liquid ran to a needle taped to her arm. A second bag hung below the other; the tube disappeared under the covers.
As if he’d been tapped on the shoulder, the man on the other side of the bed looked up and towards Brunetti. He blinked and dropped his phone, leaned forward in his chair, his hands on the arms, and pushed himself to his feet, hands raised, ready to confront whatever danger Brunetti might represent.
‘Scusi, Signore,’ Brunetti began. ‘Sono qua per . . .’ hoping to calm the other man by explaining why he was there.
The man took two slow steps towards him and stopped. ‘Who are you. A doctor?’ he asked in English.
Brunetti answered in the same language ‘No, I’m not a doctor, Mr Watson,’ he said, realizing it would be best to tell him immediately who he was. ‘I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti, from the police. I’ve come to visit your daughter.’