God's Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

must have accomplices who were pretending to be his relatives and coming to pay him visits. There couldn’t be many people providing this cover. He therefore discarded those who had a lot of registered visitors. He was now left with five potential suspects. That Thursday, he waited until it was time for the evening visit, then took the corridor to the palliative care unit.
    The whole of the first floor of that wing of the hospital was occupied by patients who were terminally ill. The windows overlooked the inner courtyards of the building, and the entrances to the various storerooms and depots. Above, on the flat roof, the back of a large lit-up sign saying ‘San Filippo Neri’ was visible, supported by rusty posts stuck in the concrete. The windowless prayer room was situated between the unit’s two corridors. By day it received a little feeble light from the two frosted glass doors which gave on to the outer wing of the building, which itself could not be reached from that same floor. It was there that the first corridor ended. The second one opened off to the left of the prayer room and continued around the edge of the courtyard.
    In the first room there were two beds, the faces of their occupants, who showed no sign of movement, carved out by the dim white glow of the nightlight. Their breathing seemed to divide the narrow space into two parts: it sounded like whispered voices, trying to persuade anyone who would listen of some enormous truth. On the side of the room where the door was, it was the first – soft and phlegm-laden – which was the stronger. On the window side the breathing was dry and rasping, often breaking up into bursts of intermittent coughing. In the middle of the room both were equally audible. Despite their different rhythms, they sometimes coincided, could briefly be heard as one, then once again diverged. Like two nightbirds, they vanished and reappeared, flew suddenly downwards and soared up again. A woman was seated by the bed on the window side, her head bent, one hand on the sick man’s arm, the other telling her beads. Salazar went up to her. He glanced at the hand that was lying on the sheet, at the big black veins pierced by the needles from the drip, at the catheter tube dripping into the bag hanging from the edge of the bed. The man’s eyes were half-closed, but he was looking upwards, his open mouth almost lipless. When the woman turned in his direction, Salazar nodded his head and pointed to the crucifix on his jacket. The woman nodded and went back to her prayers. In the meantime the other patient’s visitor had also arrived. He was a big man, probably around forty. Without taking off his coat, he stood at the foot of the bed and shuffled his feet on the floor. He was holding his hat in one hand, and occasionally wiping the sweat from his forehead with the other; his expression, as he looked at the man he was visiting, was somewhere between surprise and dismay. He had a parcel of fresh linen with him, and handed it to the sister, eager to be rid of it. He cannot have been a regular visitor, because when he saw Salazar he made as though to offer him his chair. Salazar communicated his refusal by gestures, raising his hand and half-closing his eyes. Then he slipped out of the room; it had no more to tell him. He went into the next one, where the light was on, and a soundless television was sending out blue flashes over the steel of the bed frames. A man was sitting at a table near the window, holding a newspaper in place with his crooked elbows. For a moment Salazar wondered if he were crying, but the man looked up at him for a moment, dry-eyed, then carried on reading. The man in the next bed had tubes in his nose; the silence was broken by a slight gurgling sound, not unlike that of deep-sea diving equipment. The other bed, the one next to the door, was empty. Salazar carried on down the corridor to complete his pious rounds. He wanted to get this