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

made another call and gave Rossi’s name. Whatever he heard made him glance quickly toward Brunetti. He listened for a moment, covered the phone with his hand, and asked Brunetti, ‘Are you a relative?’
     
    ‘No.’
     
    ‘Then what? A friend?’
     
    Without hesitation, Brunetti made the claim. ‘Yes.’
     
    The porter said a few more words into the phone, listened, then set it down. He kept his eyes on the phone for a moment, then looked up at Brunetti. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but your friend died this morning.’
     
    Brunetti felt the shock and then a hint of the sudden pain he would have felt had it been a real friend who had died. But all he could say was, ‘Orthopaedics?’
     
    The porter gave a small shrug to distance himself from any information he had been given or had passed on. ‘They told me they took him there because both his arms were broken.’
     
    ‘But what did he die of?’
     
    The porter paused, giving death the silence it was due. ‘The nurse didn’t say. But maybe they’d give you more information if you went and talked to them. Do you know the way?’
     
    He did. As he stepped back from the desk, the porter said, ‘I’m sorry about your friend, Signore.’
     
    Brunetti nodded his thanks and started through the high-arched entrance hall, blind to its beauty. By a conscious effort of will, he prevented himself from counting over, like the beads on the rosary of myth, the stories he’d heard of the legendary inefficiency of the hospital. Rossi had been taken to Orthopaedics, and there he had died. And that was all he needed to think about right now.
     
    In London and New York, he knew, there were musical shows that had been running for years. The casts changed, new actors took over the roles from those who retired or went on to different shows, but the plots and the costumes remained the same, year after year. It seemed to Brunetti that much the same happened here: the patients changed, but their costumes and the general air of misery that surrounded them did not. Men and women shuffled through the arcades and stood at the bar in their dressing gowns and pyjamas, supporting themselves on casts and crutches, while the same stories were played out endlessly: some of the players went on to other roles. Some, like Rossi, left the stage.
     
    When he arrived at Orthopaedics, he found a nurse standing outside the door, lounging at the top of the stairs, smoking a cigarette. As he approached, she stabbed out the cigarette in a paper cup she held in her other hand and opened the door, heading back into the ward.
     
    ‘Excuse me,’ Brunetti said, walking quickly through the door close behind her.
     
    She tossed the paper cup into a metal wastepaper basket and turned to look at him. ‘Yes?’ she asked, barely glancing at him.
     
    ‘I’ve come for Franco Rossi,’ he said. ‘The porter told me he was here.’
     
    She looked at him more closely, and her professional opacity softened, as if his proximity to death made him worthy of better treatment. ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.
     
    ‘No, a friend.’
     
    ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said, and in her tone there was nothing of her profession, only the sincere acknowledgement of human grief.
     
    Brunetti thanked her and then asked, ‘What happened?’
     
    She moved off slowly and Brunetti walked along with her, assuming she was leading him toward Franco Rossi, his friend Franco Rossi. ‘They brought him in here Saturday afternoon,’ she explained. ‘They could see downstairs when they examined him that both arms were broken, so they sent him up here.’
     
    ‘But it said in the paper that he was in a coma.’
     
    She hesitated, then suddenly began to walk faster, toward a pair of swinging doors at the end of the corridor. ‘I can’t say anything about that. But he was unconscious when they brought him up.’
     
    ‘Unconscious from what?’
     
    She paused again, as if considering how much she