Persona Non Grata Read Free

antiseptic and muted suffering.
    There was nobody.
    He started walking down the corridor. Flooding morning light came through the windows. At the end of the corridor he found a nurse.
    “The little girl with stab wounds?”
    She was plump and beneath the gull-wing coiffe of her religious order she looked stocky. The face was pale; a crucifix hung at her neck.
    “I’m looking for the girl who was stabbed early this morning.”
    “Who are you?”
    “Pubblica Sicurezza,” Trotti said tersely. “Squadra Mobile.”
    “What little girl?” She softened her Rs with a Piemonte accent. Before Trotti could reply she turned on her heel and said, “You’d better follow me,” heading off along the rubber-tile floor.
    They went down the corridor, past the busts of earlier benefactors, now sightless in their whitewashed niches.
    CHIRURGIA D ’ URGENZA —Emergency Surgery.
    The nun raised her hand and knocked on a door that had been painted mustard yellow. She turned to him. “Sit there.” She indicated a short bench. She then went through the door. It hissed shut behind her.
    Trotti stared at his hands.
    The nurse came back five minutes later.
    “Vardin?” she asked. “Laura Vardin?”
    Trotti nodded and again the nun went away, this time to return with a young doctor who was in the process of peeling rubber gloves from his long, thin hands.
    Trotti stood up and the two men nodded to each other without shaking hands. On one of the gloves there were dark traces.
    “She’s sleeping.” His Italian was good but he spoke with a marked accent.
    “Sleeping?”
    His name was on his lapel. Dottor James Wafula. An African with large, brown eyes and a flat, intelligent face. His white coat was undone at the neck and there was no shirt beneath but several tight curls of dark chest hair. “You have just operated on her, Dottore?”
    “Goodness, no.” The doctor noticed Trotti’s glance to the bloodstains. “We finished with the child a couple of hours ago.”
    “Then she’s all right?” He was surprised by the excitement in his own voice. “She’s going to live?”
    The laugh was infectious. “Of course.” Dottor Wafula added, “But there may be scars.”
    “Her life is not in danger?”
    “She is going to live to a ripe old age, I am quite sure, with children and grandchildren.” The eyes were rapidly squeezed shut with amusement. “She was covered in blood—she had been stabbed ten times.” The face immediately grew serious. “There was only one dangerous stab wound—on her shoulder and not really very deep. It was probably what woke her—perhaps saved her life. But I am not sure that her attacker was trying to kill her. If it was a knife he used, it was sharp but not very long. The wounds are not deep. I don’t think it was a knife.”
    “What was it?”
    “You see, I didn’t give her more than three stitches in all, and apart from the shoulder wound, everything was very superficial.”
    “What instrument, Dottore?”
    The doctor raised his shoulders slightly. “Perhaps they were just playing games.”
    “They?”
    Dottor Wafula looked at Trotti but he said nothing while he rubbed the gloves into a ball and placed them into the pocket of his white coat. He lit an English cigarette. “Stab wounds can leave traces,” he said, after exhaling smoke into the air. “I think I have done a useful job.” The teeth were not white but yellow; against the black skin, the smile was brilliant. “You white people are lucky.”
    “Lucky to have you to sew us up?”
    “You’ve never noticed the navel on African children?”
    Trotti shook his head.
    “Black skin can swell up when it heals. It is a phenomenon that is rare in white-skinned people.”
    “Why don’t you think her attacker was trying to kill her?”
    Wafula shook his head as he inhaled the cigarette smoke.
    “In your opinion, why was she attacked? The wounds are not deep … it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
    “What did you say the name