Pucetti was silent, his eyes still on the perfectly relaxed Brunetti. He struggled for speech, but it took him some time to achieve it. ‘The girl’s dead, and he’s talking like that,’ he finally sputtered. ‘He can’t do that. It’s not decent. Someone should slap his mouth shut.’
‘Not you, Pucetti,’ Brunetti said sharply, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘It’s not your job to teach him manners. It’s to treat him with respect because he’s a citizen and he hasn’t been formally accused of any crime.’ Brunetti thought for a moment and corrected himself. ‘Or even if he’d been accused of a crime.’ Pucetti’s face was rigid. Brunetti didn’t know if it was from resentment or embarrassment and didn’t care. ‘Do you understand that, Pucetti?’
‘Sì, Signore,’ the younger man said and pushed himself to his feet.
‘Not so fast,’ Brunetti stopped him; he’d heard the sound of approaching voices. Seeing Pucetti’s confusion, he added, ‘You heard what he said when he was leaving, didn’t you, that there was nothing wrong with me.’
‘No, sir,’ Pucetti answered.
‘It’s what he started to say before you shouted at him again.’ The voices grew nearer. ‘Get back down here and put your palms on my chest and give me CPR, for God’s sake.’
Blank-faced and looking lost, Pucetti did what he was ordered and knelt beside Brunetti, who lay back down and closed his eyes. Pucetti put one palm on Brunetti’s chest, his other palm on top of it, and started to press, counting out the seconds in a low voice.
‘He’s in there,’ Ruggieri said from the corridor.
Brunetti opened his eyes to slits and saw two pairs of uniformed legs come through the door, followed closely by the dark grey slacks of Ruggieri’s suit. ‘What’s going on?’ came the voice of Lieutenant Scarpa.
Pucetti suspended his counting, but not the rhythmic pressure, and answered, ‘I think it’s his heart, Lieutenant,’ then went back to counting out the seconds.
‘An ambulance is coming,’ Scarpa said. Brunetti saw the other uniformed legs turn to the side, and Scarpa said, ‘Go down and wait for it. Bring them up here.’ The legs turned and left the room.
‘What happened?’ Scarpa asked.
‘I thought he was going to attack me,’ Ruggieri began, ‘but then he stood up and fell against him.’ Brunetti realized this confusion of pronouns was unlikely to make any sense to the Lieutenant, so he closed his eyes and started to pant softly in rhythm with the pressure of Pucetti’s hands.
Brunetti heard footsteps move to the end of the table and then approach. ‘Has he had heart trouble before?’ the Lieutenant asked.
‘I don’t know, Lieutenant. Vianello might.’
After a long silence, Scarpa said, ‘You want me to take over?’ Brunetti was glad his eyes were closed. He kept on panting.
‘No, sir. I’ve got the rhythm going.’
‘All right.’
The approaching two-beat of the ambulance’s siren slipped into Brunetti’s consciousness. Good Lord, what had he done? He’d hoped to create a momentary distraction to stop Pucetti from attacking the man, but things had got out of control entirely, and now he was on the floor with Pucetti feigning CPR and Lieutenant Scarpa offering to help.
Would they try to find Vianello? Or call Paola? She’d been asleep when he left that morning, so they hadn’t spoken.
He hadn’t considered the consequences of his behaviour, had done the first thing he thought would save Pucetti. He could have blamed it on not having slept last night, or having slept too much, because of what he’d eaten or not eaten. Too much coffee, no coffee. But he’d gone too far by falling against Pucetti. And here they were, and here was the ambulance crew.
Footsteps, noise, Pucetti gone, different hands, mask over his nose and mouth, hands under his ankles and shoulders, stretcher, ambulance, siren, the calming up and down of motion on the water, slow slide into the dock, bumbling about, transfer to a harder surface, the sound of wheels on marble floors as he was rolled through the hospital. He peeked through slitted eyes and saw the automatic doors and huge red cross of Pronto Soccorso.
Inside, he was wheeled quickly past Reception and parked alongside the wall of a corridor. After some time, he heard footsteps approach. Someone slipped a pillow under his head while another person put something around his wrist, a blanket was placed over him and pulled to his waist, and then the footsteps moved away.
Brunetti lay still for minutes, eyes tightly closed until he remembered he had to think of a way to put an end to this. He couldn’t jump up and pretend to be Lazarus, nor could he push the blanket aside and step down from the bed, saying he had to get back to work. He lay still and waited. He lapsed into something approaching sleep and was awakened by movement. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a small examination room, a white-uniformed nurse lowering the sides of his rolling bed. Before he could ask her anything, she left the room.
Very shortly after this, a woman wearing a white jacket entered the room and approached his bedside without speaking. Their eyes met and she nodded. He noticed that she carried a plastic folder. She reached out her hand and touched his, turned it over, and felt for his pulse. She looked at her watch, made a note in the file, then peeled down his lower eyelid, still saying nothing. He stared ahead.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.
Brunetti thought it wiser to nod than to speak.
‘Do you feel any pain?’
He looked up at the woman, saw her nametag, but the angle prevented him from reading it.
‘A little,’ he whispered.
She was about his age, dark-haired. Her skin was dry, her eyes weary and wary.
‘Where?’
‘My arm,’ he said, having a vague memory that one sign of a heart attack was pain in one of the arms; the left, he thought.
The woman made a note. After a moment, she turned away from him and slipped the file into a clear plastic holder attached to the top rail of his bed.
‘Can you tell me what’s happened, Dottoressa?’ he asked, thinking that was the sort of thing a person would ask if he’d been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
She turned back to him, and he saw her name: Dottoressa Sanmartini. Her expression was so neutral that Brunetti wondered if she knew she was speaking to a human being. ‘Your vital signs,’ she began, pointing to his file suspended from the bed, ‘offer a wide range of interpretation.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.
Then she looked across at him, this time appearing to notice him. ‘What work do you do?’
‘I’m a commissario of police,’ he answered.
‘Ah,’ escaped her lips. She pulled out the file, opened it, and wrote something on the top sheet.
‘I’m feeling better, I think,’ Brunetti said nervously, thinking it was time to stop all this and get out of there.
‘We still have to do some tests,’ she cut him short by saying. Then, perhaps in response to his expression, she added, ‘Don’t worry, Signor …’ she looked at his chart, ‘… Brunetti. We’ll check a few things, just to be sure what’s going on.’