Friends in High Places by Donna Leon Read Free Book Online Page A

unfolded the paper and glanced at the articles at the bottom of the page.
     
    To the left was a photo; he recognized the face but couldn’t place it until he read the name in the caption: ‘Francesco Rossi, city surveyor, in a coma after falling from scaffolding.’
     
    Brunetti’s hands tightened on the pages of the newspaper. He glanced away and then back to the story below the photo.
     
    Francesco Rossi, a surveyor in the employ of the Ufficio Catasto, fell on Saturday afternoon from the scaffolding in front of a building in Santa Croce, where he was conducting the inspection of a restoration project. Rossi was taken to the emergency room at the Ospedale Civile, where his condition is given as ‘riservata’.
     
    Long before he became a policeman, Brunetti had abandoned any belief he had ever had in coincidence. Things happened, he knew, because other things had happened. Since becoming a policeman, he had added to this a conviction that the connections between events, at least such events as it became his duty to consider, were seldom innocent. Franco Rossi had failed to make much of an impression on Brunetti, save for that one moment of near-panic when he had raised his hand defensively as if to press away Brunetti’s invitation that he step out on to the terrace to have a look at the windows below. In that one instant, and for that one instant, he had ceased to be the dedicated, colourless bureaucrat able to do little more than recite the regulations of his department and had become, for Brunetti, a man like himself, filled with the weaknesses that make us human.
     
    Not for a moment did it occur to Brunetti that Franco Rossi had fallen from that scaffolding. Nor did he waste his time considering the possibility that Rossi’s attempted phone call concerned some minor problem at his office, someone detected trying to get a building permit approved illegally.
     
    These certainties fixed in his mind, Brunetti stepped back into Signorina Elettra’s office and placed the newspaper on her desk. Her back was still to him, and she laughed softly at something said to her. Without bothering to attract her attention and without giving a thought to Patta’s summons, Brunetti left the Questura, heading for the Ospedale Civile.
     
    * * * *
     

6
     
     
    As he approached the hospital, Brunetti found himself thinking of all the times his work had brought him here; not so much recalling the specific people he had been called to visit as the times when he’d passed, Dante-like, through the yawning portals beyond which lurked pain, suffering, and death. Over the course of the years, he’d come to suspect that, no matter how great the physical pain, the emotional suffering which surrounded that pain was often far worse. He shook his head to clear it of these thoughts, reluctant to enter with these miserable reflections already in his care.
     
    At the porter’s desk Brunetti asked where he’d find the man, Franco Rossi, who had been injured in a fall during the weekend. The porter, a dark-bearded man who looked faintly familiar to Brunetti, asked if he knew which ward Signor Rossi had been taken to: Brunetti had no idea but guessed he was probably in Intensive Care. The porter made a call, spoke for a moment, then made another call. After speaking briefly, he told Brunetti that Signor Rossi was neither in Intensive Care nor in Emergency.
     
    ‘Neurology, then?’ suggested Brunetti.
     
    With the calm efficiency of long experience, the porter dialled another number from memory, but with the same result.
     
    ‘Then where could he be?’ Brunetti asked.
     
    ‘Are you sure he was brought here?’ the porter asked.
     
    ‘That’s what was in Il Gazzettino.’
     
    If the porter’s accent had not already told Brunetti he was Venetian, the look he gave in response to this would have. All he said, however, was, ‘He hurt himself in a fall?’ At Brunetti’s nod, he suggested, ‘Let me try Orthopaedics, then.’ He