by Donna Leon
‘What particular part of my behaviour, sir?’
Brunetti noticed that the Vice-Questore was losing his tan. And his patience. ‘For this crusade you seem to be launching against Holy Mother Church, for one thing,’ Patta said and then stopped, as if capable himself of hearing the exaggeration in the claim.
‘Specifically, sir?’ Brunetti asked, rubbing his palm along the side of his jaw and discovering a spot he had missed when he shaved with the electric razor he kept in his desk.
‘With your persecution of men who wear the cloth. With the violence of your behaviour toward the Mother Superior of the Order of the Sacred Cross.’ Patta stopped here, as if waiting for the seriousness of these accusations to sink in.
‘And with my asking questions about Opus Dei? Is that on Lieutenant Scarpa’s list, as well?’
‘Who told you about that?’ Patta asked.
‘I assume that, if the Lieutenant is making a general list of my excesses, that would certainly be on it. Especially if, as I believe, the orders for him to do so come from Opus Dei.’
Patta slammed his hand down on his desk. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa takes his orders from me, Commissario.’
‘Am I to take it, then, that you too are a member?’
Patta pulled his chair closer to the desk and leaned over it, toward Brunetti. ‘Commissario, I’m not sure that this is a place where you are the one to ask questions.’
Brunetti shrugged.
‘Do I have your attention, Commissario Brunetti?’ Patta asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said in a voice which, to his surprise, he did not have to struggle to make level and calm. He didn’t care about any of this, suddenly felt himself free of Patta and Scarpa.
‘There have been complaints about you, complaints of a wide variety. The Prior of the Order of the Sacred Cross has called to object to your treatment of members of his order. Further, he says you are harbouring a member of the order.’
‘Harbouring?’
‘That she’s been taken to the hospital and is now conscious and no doubt beginning to spread slander about the order. Is this true?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know where she is?’
‘You just said where she is, in the hospital.’
‘Where you visit her and permit no one else to do so?’
‘Where she is under police protection.’
‘Police protection?’ Patta repeated in a voice that could be heard, Brunetti feared, on the lower floors. ‘And who authorized this protection? Why has there been no mention of it on the duty rosters?’
‘Have you seen the rosters, sir?’
‘Don’t worry about who’s seen the rosters, Brunetti. Just tell me why there is no mention of her name on them.’
‘It was entered as “surveillance”.’
Again, Patta roared back an echo of Brunetti’s word.
‘For days, policemen have been sitting in the hospital, doing nothing, and you dare to put it down as “surveillance”?’
Brunetti stopped himself from asking Patta if he wanted him to change the wording and put it down as ‘guarding’ and chose the wiser course of silence.
‘And who’s there now?’ Patta demanded.
‘Gravini.’
‘Well, get him out of there. The police in this city have better things to do than sit outside the room of some runaway nun who’s gone and got herself into the hospital.’
‘I believe she’s in danger, sir.’
Patta waved a hand wildly in the air. ‘I don’t want to know about danger. I don’t care if she’s in danger. If she’s seen fit to leave the protection of Holy Mother Church, then she should be ready to take responsibility for herself in this world she’s so eager to enter.’ He saw Brunetti start to object and raised his voice. ‘Gravini is to be out of the hospital in ten minutes and back here in the squad room.’ Again, Brunetti started to explain, but Patta cut him off. ‘No policeman is to be there, outside that room. If they are, if anyone goes there, they will be relieved of their duties immediately.’ Patta leaned even farther over his desk and added ominously, ‘As will be the person who sent them there. Do you understand that, Commissario?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And I want you to stay away from members of the Order of the Sacred Cross. The Prior does not expect an apology from you, though I think that’s extraordinary, after what I’ve heard about your behaviour.’
Brunetti knew Patta in this vein, though he had never seen him this unhinged. As Patta continued to talk, spiralling ever higher in pursuit of his own anger, Brunetti began to calculate the reason for the extremity of Patta’s response, and the only satisfactory explanation he came up with was fear. If Patta was a member of Opus Dei, his response would be nothing stronger than outrage; he had seen that in Patta enough times to know that what was now being manifested was something else entirely and something far stronger. Fear, then.
Patta’s voice called him back. ‘Do you understand that, Brunetti?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll call Gravini,’ he said and started toward the door.
‘If you send anyone there, Brunetti, you’re finished. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir, I do,’ he said. Patta had said nothing about anyone’s being their on his own time, not that it would have made any difference to Brunetti if he had.
He called the hospital from Signorina Elettra’s desk and asked to speak to Gravini. There followed a series of messages to and from the policeman, who refused to leave the room, even when Brunetti told the person at the hospital to tell him that it was an order from the Commissario. Finally, after more than five minutes, Gravini came to the phone. The first thing he said was, ‘There’s a doctor in the room with her. He won’t leave until I get back.’ Only then he asked if he was speaking to Brunetti.
‘Yes, it’s me, Gravini. You can come back here now.’
‘Is it over, sir?’ Gravini asked.
‘You can come back to the Questura, Gravini,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘But go home and put your uniform on first.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the young man said and hung up, persuaded by Brunetti’s tone to ask no more questions.
Before going back to his office, Brunetti went into the officers’ room and picked up a copy of that morning’s Gazzettino he saw lying on a desk. He turned to the Venezia section, but the article about Maria Testa appeared nowhere. He turned to the first section, but nothing was there either. He pulled out a chair and spread the paper open on the desk in front of him. Column by column, he went slowly through both sections of the paper. Nothing. No story had appeared, and yet someone with enough power to frighten Patta had learned of Brunetti’s interest in Maria Testa. Or, even more interesting, they had somehow come to learn that she had regained consciousness. As he climbed the stairs to his office, a brief smile flit for a second across Brunetti’s face.
Chapter Twenty
At lunch, he found the mood of the entire family as subdued as the mood he brought back with him from the Questura. He attributed Raffi’s silence to some difficulty in the course of his romance with Sara Paganuzzi; Chiara was perhaps still smarting under the cloud that had marred the perfection of her academic record. As always, it was the cause of Paola’s mood that was the most difficult to assess.
There was none of the usual joking with which they displayed their boundless affection for one another. Instead, at one point, Brunetti found them discussing the weather, and then, as though that weren’t grim enough, politics. All of them were visibly glad to see the meal end. The children, like cave-dwelling animals which had been frightened by signs of lightning on the horizon, scurried back to the security of their rooms. Brunetti, having already read the paper, went into the living room and contented himself with watching sheets of rain batter themselves against the rooftops.
When Paola came in, she carried coffee, and Brunetti decided to view it as a peace offering, though he was uncertain about what sort of treaty was
going to accompany it. He took the coffee and thanked her. He took a sip and asked, ‘Well?’
‘I’ve spoken to my father,’ Paola said as she took a seat on the sofa. ‘He was the only one I could think of.’
‘And what did you tell him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I told him what Signora Stocco told me, and what the children have said.’
‘About Padre Luciano?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘He said he’d look into it.’
‘Did you tell him anything about Padre Pio?’ Brunetti asked.
She glanced up, surprised at the question. ‘No, of course not. Why do you ask?’
‘Just asking,’ he said.
‘Guido,’ she began, setting her empty cup on the table, ‘you know I don’t interfere, not in any way, with your work. If you want to ask my father about Padre Pio or about Opus Dei, then you have to do it yourself.’
Brunetti had no desire to have his father-in-law interfere in this, not in any way. But he didn’t want to tell Paola that his reluctance was based on his doubts about where Count Orazio’s allegiance would lie, whether to Brunetti’s profession or to Opus Dei itself. Just as Brunetti had no idea of the extent of the Count’s wealth and power, he was equally ignorant of their source and of the connections or loyalties which would make them possible. ‘Did he believe you?’ he asked her.
‘Of course he believed me. Why do you even ask that?’
Brunetti tried to shrug this away, but a glance from Paola denied him that chance. ‘It’s not as if you’ve got the most reliable of witnesses.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, voice sharp.
‘Children speaking badly of a teacher who gave one of them a bad grade. The words of another child, filtered through a mother who was obviously hysterical when she spoke to you.’
‘What are you doing, Guido, trying to play Devil’s Advocate? You showed me that report from the Patriarchate. What do you think this bastard’s been doing all these years, taking thousand-lire bills from the poor box?’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘No, I have no doubts, none at all, about what he’s been doing, but that’s not the same as having proof.’
A wave from Paola dismissed this as so much nonsense. ‘I’m going to stop him,’ Paola said with naked aggression.
‘Or just move him?’ Brunetti asked. ‘As they’ve been doing for years?’
‘I said I’m going to stop him, and that’s what I’m going to do,’ Paola repeated, enunciating every syllable, as if for the deaf.
‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘I hope you do. I hope you can.’
To his vast surprise, Paola answered with a quotation from the Bible: ‘“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”’
‘Where’d that come from?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Matthew. Chapter eighteen, verse six ...’
‘No,’ Brunetti said, shaking his head from side to side. ‘It’s strange to hear you, of all people, quoting the Bible.’
‘Even the Devil is said to have that capacity,’ she answered, but smiling for the first time and, with that smile, brightening the room.
‘Good,’ Brunetti affirmed. ‘I hope your father has the power to do something.’ Brunetti half-expected her to answer that there was nothing her father could not do and surprised himself by realizing that he, as well, at least half-believed this.
Instead, she asked, ‘And you, with your priests?’
‘There’s only one left,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Signorina Elettra’s friend in the Patriarch’s office said that Contessa Crivoni and the priest, who seems to be wealthy in his own right, have been having an affair for years. Apparently her husband knew about it.’
‘He knew?’ Paola asked in open surprise.
‘He preferred young boys.’
‘You believe this?’ Paola asked.
Brunetti nodded. ‘The fact that she had a husband provided them with cover. Neither she nor the priest would wish him dead.’
‘So there really is only one left,’ Paola said.
‘Yes.’ Brunetti told her about Patta’s anger and his command that police protection be removed from Maria Testa. He made no attempt to disguise his certainty that Padre Pio and the powers standing behind him were the original source of that order.
‘What are you going to do?’ Paola asked when he finished explaining.
‘I’ve spoken to Vianello. He’s got a friend who works in the hospital as an orderly, and he’s agreed to look in on her during the day.’
‘Not much, is it?’ she asked. ‘And the nights?’
‘Vianello’s offered – I didn’t ask him, Paola, he offered – to be there until midnight.’
‘And that means you’ll be there from midnight until eight?’
Brunetti nodded.
‘How long will this go on?’
Brunetti shrugged. ‘Until they decide to make a move, I suppose.’
‘And how long will that be?’ she asked.
‘That depends on how frightened they are. Or how much they think she knows.’
‘Do you think it’s Padre Pio?’
Brunetti had always tried to avoid naming the person he suspected of a crime, and he tried to do so this time, but she could read his answer in his silence.
She got to her feet. ‘If you’ve got to be up all night, why don’t you try to get some sleep now?’
‘“A wife is her husband’s richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,”’ he quoted, happy to have, for once, beaten her at her best game.
She couldn’t disguise her surprise, nor her delight. ‘It is true, then?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘That the Devil really can quote Scripture.’
*
That night, Brunetti again dragged himself from the warm cocoon of his bed and dressed himself to the sound of the rain that still pounded down on the city. Paola opened her eyes, made a kissing motion in his direction, and was immediately asleep again. This time, he remembered his boots but didn’t bother to take an umbrella for Vianello.
At the hospital, they again went out into the hallway to talk, though they had little to say. Lieutenant Scarpa had spoken to Vianello that afternoon and had repeated to him Patta’s orders about staffing. Like Patta, he had said nothing about what officers chose to do with their own time, which had encouraged Vianello to speak to Gravini, Pucetti and even a repentant Alvise, all of whom had volunteered to fill in the hours of the day, Pucetti offering to relieve Brunetti at six in the morning.
‘Even Alvise?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Even Alvise,’ Vianello answered. ‘The fact that he’s stupid doesn’t stop him from being good-spirited.’
‘No,’ Brunetti answered immediately, ‘that seems to happen only in Parliament.’
Vianello laughed, pulled on his raincoat, and wished Brunetti good night.
Back in the room, Brunetti walked to within a metre of the bed and looked at the sleeping woman. Her cheeks had sunken in even more, and the only sign of life was the pale liquid which dripped slowly from a bottle suspended above her and into a tube which fed into her arm, that and the remorselessly slow rise and fall of her chest.
‘Maria?’ he called, and then, ‘Suor’Immacolata?’ Her breast continued to rise and fall, rise and fall, and the liquid continued to drip, but nothing else happened.
Brunetti switched on the overhead light, pulled his edition of Marcus Aurelius from his pocket, and began to read. At two, a nurse came in and took Maria’s pulse and entered it on the chart. ‘How is she?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Her pulse is quicker,’ the nurse said. ‘That sometimes happens when there’s going to be a change.’
‘You mean, that she’s
going to wake up?’ he asked.
The nurse didn’t smile. ‘It can be that,’ she said and left the room before Brunetti had time to ask her what else it could be.
At three, he switched off the light and closed his eyes, but when his head fell forward on his chest, he forced himself to his feet and stood against the wall behind his chair. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Sometime later, the door opened again, and a different nurse came into the darkened room. Like the one the previous night, she carried a covered tray. Saying nothing, Brunetti watched her as she made her way across the room until she stood beside the bed, just inside the pool of light cast by the bedside lamp. She reached up and moved the covers, and Brunetti, thinking it immodest to watch whatever it was she had been sent to do for the sleeping woman, lowered his eyes.
And saw the marks her shoes had left on the floor, each wet footprint carefully stamped out behind her. Even before he was conscious of what he was doing, Brunetti launched himself across the space between them, his right hand raised above his head. While still a few steps from her, he saw the towel that covered the tray fall to the floor and saw the long blade of the knife hidden under it. He screamed aloud, a wordless, meaningless noise, and saw the face of Signorina Lerini as she turned toward this form hurtling out of the darkness toward her.
The tray crashed to the floor and she turned toward Brunetti, knife slashing out in a purely instinctive arc. Brunetti tried to wheel away from it, but he was moving too fast and was carried within her reach. The blade slashed through the cloth of his left sleeve and across the muscles of his upper arm. His scream was deafening, and he repeated it again and again, hoping it would bring someone to the room.
One hand grasped to the cut, he turned toward her, afraid that she would come at him. But she had turned back to the woman who lay on the bed and, as he watched, she pulled the knife back level with her hip. Brunetti forced himself toward her again, pulling his hand away from the cut on his arm. Again, he screamed the same wordless sound, but she ignored him and took a step closer to Maria.
Brunetti made a fist with his right hand, raised it above his head, and slammed it down on her elbow, hoping to knock the knife to the ground. He felt, then heard, the shattering of bone but didn’t know if it was the bone of her arm or of his hand.
