Free God's Dog by Diego Marani

after the family has been notified of the death. For the moment we cannot touch the body,’ said the police doctor, following the nurse and his colleague into the corridor. Meanwhile the sister had opened the gate and the relatives had filed into the unit. Salazar felt a sudden premonition. He stayed on for a time in room 148, which was now empty, then scanned the small crowd in the entrance hall and went down the stairs to the vending machine. There was no one there. It was then that he realised that the dead man was not Marco Bonardi, but Davide Zago. And whoever the woman in the blue handkerchief was, she had achieved her aim.
    Since escaping from the re-education centre almost ten years ago, after having been sentenced for abortion, Marta Quinz had been in hiding. She had been given a five-year sentence for having aborted the child she had conceived as the result of a rape. She had just started working as a doctor in the maternity department of a Milanese hospital when she was struck by a tragedy which was to change her life. Two guardians of the faith were on her trail because they suspected her of allowing newborn babies with serious impairments to die, but they could not come up with any conclusive evidence against her, and this enraged them. They had lain in wait for her one night in the hospital parking lot and bundled her into a car; they had threatened and beaten her, telling her that she would have to confess if she didn’t want something worse to happen. Marta had held out against their blows; if she had talked, dozens of families would have been incriminated, dozens of mothers would have ended up in prison. Her kidnappers were convinced that she would blurt out the truth at the first slap; they had not expected such resistance. The car had stopped at a traffic light, and Marta had managed to jump out, but they had caught up with her and had given her a hard night. They had not even bothered to cover their faces, so certain were they that they would get off scot-free. They had left her bleeding on a street on the outskirts of town, and had she not received help from a tramp who was sleeping rough under a bridge over the motorway, she would have died. She did not want to report a rape: if a woman became pregnant as a result, she was obliged to carry the pregnancy to term. Marta had asked for help from a colleague in the hospital. In the distant past, she and Ivan had had an affair, a long-standing relationship which had somehow recently petered out; through apathy, perhaps, she was not really sure.
    Ivan had taken care of everything. He had bribed a male nurse to leave him the keys of an operating theatre, and one January night he had performed an abortion on Marta in the very department where she worked. They had left the clinic together, in a car belonging to the medical police, using a forged pass supposedly belonging to one of its members. But someone had informed on them, and the guardians of the faith had obliged Marta to undergo a medical examination. The result left no room for doubt. They were both found guilty of illegal abortion; he had been sentenced to ten years in prison, while she had managed to escape, had gone into hiding, and was now in charge of the Roman branch of the Free Death Brigade, her photograph still on the wanted persons list. But time, and a certain amount of ingenuity, had helped her to become less recognisable; she knew better than anyone else who her enemies were, and had learned the art of disguise accordingly. She had narrowly avoided arrest on two occasions, when she had helped other women who were seeking abortions. The police had ransacked her illicit clinic, breaking in just before she received a warning. But then the Free Death Brigade had changed tack. It was less risky to help women to go abroad for their abortions; a holiday in Corsica or the Balearic Islands would serve as cover. But the police were becoming aware of what was going on, and were now asking for