Friends in High Places by Donna Leon Page B

on his shoulders than on those who had actually treated Rossi. ‘If Orthopaedics failed to send him on for further treatment, that’s not my responsibility. You should be talking to them.’
     
    ‘How serious was the injury to his head?’ Brunetti asked.
     
    ‘I’m not a neurologist,’ Carraro answered instantly, just as Brunetti had thought he would.
     
    ‘A moment ago, you said you noted the injury on his chart.’
     
    ‘Yes, it’s there,’ Carraro said.
     
    Brunetti was tempted to tell him that his own presence there had nothing to do with a possible charge of malpractice, but he doubted that Carraro would believe him or, even if he did, that it would make a difference. He’d dealt with many bureaucracies in his career, and bitter and repeated experience had taught him that only the military and the Mafia, and perhaps the Church, were as likely as the medical profession to fall into the instant goosestep of mutual protection and denial, regardless of the cost to justice, truth, or life.
     
    ‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with a finality the other man clearly found surprising. ‘I’d like to see him.’
     
    ‘Rossi?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘He’s in the morgue,’ Carraro explained, his voice as cool as the place itself. ‘Do you know the way?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    * * * *
     
    7
     
     
    Mercifully, Brunetti’s path took him outside and along the main courtyard of the hospital, and so he had a brief glimpse of sky and blossoming trees; he wished he could somehow store up the beauty of the plump clouds glimpsed through the pink blossoms and take it with him. He turned into the narrow passageway that led to the obitorio, vaguely troubled to realize how familiar he was with the way to death.
     
    At the door, the attendant recognized him and greeted him with a nod. He was a man who, through decades of dealing with the dead, had taken on their silence.
     
    ‘Franco Rossi,’ Brunetti said by way of explanation.
     
    Another nod and the man turned away from the door, leading Brunetti into the room where a number of white-sheeted forms lay on hip-high tables. The attendant led Brunetti to the far side of the room and stopped by one of the tables, but he made no effort to remove the cloth. Brunetti looked down: the raised pyramid of the nose, a dropping off at the chin, and then an uneven surface broken by two horizontal lumps that must be the plaster-cast arms, and then two horizontal tubes that ended where the feet jutted off to the sides.
     
    ‘He was my friend,’ Brunetti said, perhaps to himself, and pulled the cloth back from the face.
     
    The indentation above the left eye was blue and destroyed the symmetry of the forehead, which was strangely flattened, as if it had been pushed in by an enormous palm. For the rest, it was the same face, plain and unremarkable. Paola had once told him that her hero, Henry James, had referred to death as ‘the distinguished thing’, but there was nothing distinguished about what lay under Brunetti’s gaze: it was flat, anonymous, cold.
     
    He pulled the cloth back over Rossi’s face, distracted by the desire to know how much of what lay there was Rossi; and if Rossi was no longer there, why what was left deserved so much respect. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the attendant and left the room. His response to the greater warmth of the courtyard was completely animal: he could almost feel the hair on the back of his neck smooth itself down. He thought about going to Orthopaedia to see what sort of justification they might engage in, but the sight of Rossi’s battered face lingered, and he wanted nothing so much as to get out of the confines of the hospital. He gave in to this desire and left. He paused again at the desk, this time showing his warrant card, and asked for Rossi’s address.
     
    The porter found it quickly and added the phone number. It was a low number in Castello, and when Brunetti asked the porter if he knew where it was, he