Flavia got to her feet and went into the bedroom. She ripped the covers from the bed and dragged them back into the foyer, where she spread them over the motionless form on the floor. She opened the door to the apartment, not bothering to check through the spyhole to see if the two men had returned. Leaving the door open behind her, she ran down two flights of stairs and pounded heavily on the door of the apartment below.
After a few moments, the door was opened by a middle-aged man, tall and balding, who held a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other. ‘Luca,’ Flavia gasped, fighting the impulse to scream as this went on and on and no one came to help her lover, ‘Brett’s hurt. She’s got to have a doctor.’ Suddenly her voice cracked and she was sobbing. ‘Please, Luca, please, get a doctor.’ She grabbed at his arm, no longer capable of speech.
Without a word, he stepped back into his apartment and grabbed his keys from a table beside the door. He dropped the book on the floor, pulled the door closed behind him, and disappeared down the steps before Flavia could say anything else.
Flavia went up the steps two at a time and back into the apartment. She looked down and saw that a small pool of blood now spread out under Brett’s face, a strand of her hair floating on the surface. Years ago, she had read or been told that people in shock should be kept awake, that it was dangerous for them to go to sleep. So she knelt again beside her friend and called her name. By now, one eye was swollen shut, but at the sound of her name, the American opened the other just a slit and looked at Flavia without giving any sign that she recognized her.
‘Luca went. The doctor will be here in a minute.’
Slowly, the eye seemed to go out of focus, then pulled itself back to look at her. Flavia crouched lower. She wiped Brett’s hair back from her face, feeling the blood trail across her fingers. ‘It’s going to be all right. They’ll be back in a minute, and you’ll be all right. Everything’s going to be all right, darling. Don’t worry.’
The eye closed, opened, drifted into long focus, then came back. ‘Hurt,’ she whispered.
‘It’s all right, Brett. It’s going to be all right.’
‘Hurt.’
Flavia knelt by her friend, gazing into the one eye, willing it to stay open and in focus, and she continued to mutter things that, in future, she never remembered having said. Sometime later, she began to weep, but she was not aware of this.
She saw Brett’s hand, half hidden by the covers, and she grabbed at it, held it softly, as though it were made of the same down as the covers around it. ‘It’s going to be all right, Brett.’
Suddenly, from below, she heard the sound of footsteps and raised voices. For an instant, it occurred to her that this might be the two men, come back to finish whatever it was they had come to do. She got to her feet and went to the door, hoping to be able to close it in time, but when she looked, she saw Luca’s face and, behind him, a man in a white jacket with a black bag in his hand.
‘Thank God,’ she said and was surprised to find that she meant it. Behind her, the music stopped. Elvira was at last reunited with her Arturo, and the opera was at an end.
* * * *
Chapter Two
Flavia stepped back from the door to allow the two men to enter. ‘What is it? What happened?’ Luca asked, looking down at the heap of covers on the floor and what they covered. ‘Dio mio,’ he said involuntarily and bent towards Brett, but Flavia stopped him with an out-thrust arm and pulled him aside, allowing room for the doctor to approach the fallen woman.
He bent down over her, reached out his hand, and felt for the pulse at her neck. Feeling it, slow but strong, he pulled back the covers to see how badly she was hurt. Her sweater was bunched in a blood-streaked tangle under her throat, exposing her ribs and torso. Her skin was red and broken in places and beginning to turn livid and dark.
‘Signora, can you hear me?’ the doctor asked.
Brett made a noise; words were too difficult now.
‘Signora, I’m going to move you. Just a little, so I can see what’s happened.’ He gestured to Flavia, who knelt down on the other side of the motionless woman. ‘Hold her shoulders. I have to straighten out her legs.’ He reached down and took her left leg by the calf, stretching it out, then did the same with the right. Slowly he turned her on to her back, and Flavia lowered her shoulder to the floor. All of this flickered through to Brett as a new wave of pain, and she moaned.
Turning back to Flavia, the doctor said, ‘Get me a pair of scissors.’ Obedient, Flavia went back into the kitchen and took a pair of scissors from a large flowered ceramic pot on the counter. As she stood there, she felt the heat radiating up from the pan of olive oil, still on the burner, hissing and sizzling at her. She snapped off the flame and went quickly back to the doctor.
He took the scissors and cut through the bloody sweater, then pulled it back from her body. The man who had beaten her had worn a heavy ring on the fourth finger of his right hand, and it had left signs of itself behind, small circular impressions that stood out in greater darkness from the livid flesh around them.
The doctor bent over her again and said, ‘Signora, please open your eyes.’
Brett struggled to obey, but she could get only one of them to open. The doctor took a small flashlight from his bag and pointed die light into her pupil. It contracted and she involuntarily closed her eye.
‘Good, good,’ the doctor said. ‘Now I’d like you to move your head a bit, just a little.’
Though it cost her a great deal, Brett managed to do it.
‘And now your mouth. Can you open that?’
When she tried that, she gasped with the pain of it, a sound that pushed Flavia up against the other wall.
‘Now I’m going to touch your ribs, signora. Tell me when it hurts.’ Gently, he prodded at her ribs. Twice, she moaned.
He took a packet of surgical gauze from his bag and ripped it open. He dampened it from a bottle of antiseptic and slowly began to clean the blood from her face. As soon as he wiped it away, more seeped from her nostril and from the gaping seam in her lower lip. He signalled to Flavia, who knelt again beside him. ‘Here, keep this on her lip, and don’t let her move.’ He handed the bloody gauze to Flavia, who did as she was told.
‘Where’s the phone?’ the doctor asked.
Nodding her head, Flavia indicated the living room. The doctor disappeared through the door, and Flavia could hear him dialling and then speaking to someone at the hospital, ordering a stretcher. Why hadn’t she thought of that? The house was so close to the hospital they had no need of an ambulance.
Luca hovered over her, finally contenting himself with bending down and pulling the covers back over Brett.
The doctor came back and stooped down beside Flavia. ‘They’ll be here soon.’ He looked down at Brett. ‘I can’t give you anything for pain until we’ve taken X-rays. Is there much pain?’
To Brett, there was nothing else but pain.
The doctor saw that she was shivering and asked, ‘Are there more blankets?’ Hearing that, Luca went into the bedroom and came back with a quilt, which he and the doctor placed on top of her, though it seemed to do no good. The world had become cold, and she knew only cold and growing pain.