The Girl of his Dreams

by Donna Leon

  'Do you miss it?' Brunetti asked.

  'What? Africa?'

  Brunetti nodded.

  Antonin used his hands to make another arc in the air. 'It's hard to say. I miss some of the things about it: the people, the immensity of the place, the sense that I was doing something important.'

  'But you came back’ Brunetti observed, saying, not asking.

  Antonin looked Brunetti in the eyes then and said, ‘I didn't have a choice.'

  Brunetti asked, 'Your health?' thinking of how thin the man had looked as he came up the steps, how thin he was now, sitting across from him.

  'Yes’ the priest said, and then added, 'in part.'

  'And the other part?' Brunetti asked because he sensed that he had been led to a point where he was expected to.

  'Problems with my superiors’ the priest answered.

  Brunetti had little interest in this man's problems with his superiors, but he thought back to what he remembered of Antonin's youthful need to command and found that he was not surprised. 'It was about four years ago that you came back, wasn't it?' Brunetti asked.

  'Yes.'

  'Is that when the war started?' Antonin shook his head. 'There's always a war in Congo. At least where I was.' 'War about what?'

  Antonin surprised him by asking, 'Are you really interested, or are you just being polite, Guido?' 'I'm interested.'

  'All right, then. The war, though there's always more than one, is really many mini wars or robber wars or robber raids - they're all about getting possession of something someone else has that you want. So you wait until you have enough men with guns, and you think you can go and take it away - whatever it is you want - from the other men who are guarding it with their guns. And then there is a fight, or a battle, or a war, and in the end the men who manage to have the most guns or the most men left get to keep or they take over the thing that both sides wanted.'

  'What things?

  'Copper. Diamonds. Other minerals. Women. Animals. It depends.' Antonin glanced at Brunetti, then went on, 'I'll give you one example. There's a mineral that's found in Congo, well, most of the present supply is found in Congo, and you have to have it to make the chips for telefonini. So you can imagine what men will do to get it’

  'No’ Brunetti said with a small shake of his head, 'I don't think I can imagine.'

  Antonin was silent for a while, then finally said, 'No, I suppose you can't, Guido. I don't think people here, with rules and police and cars and houses, have any idea of what it's like to live entirely without law’ Then, before Brunetti could say it, the priest went on, ‘I know, I know, people here talk about the Mafia and how they do whatever they want, but at least they're limited - well, sort of limited - in where they're allowed to work and what they're allowed to do. Maybe what you have to do is imagine what it would be like here if the only power were in the hands of the Mafia. If there were no government, no police, no army, nothing except roving bands of thugs who thought that having a gun gave them the right to take anything, or anyone, they wanted.'

  'And that's how you lived?' Brunetti asked.

  'Not at the beginning, no; it got worse towards the end. Before that, we had some protection. And then for a year or so, we had the UN nearby, and they kept things relatively quiet. But then they left.'

  'And then you left?' Brunetti asked.

  The priest took in a deep breath, as though someone had punched him. 'Yes, then I left’ he said. 'And now I have to busy myself with the problems of luxury.'

  'You sound as though you don't like it’ Brunetti observed.

  'It's not a question of liking or not liking, Guido. It's a question of seeing the difference and trying to believe that the effects on people are the same and that rich, comfortable people suffer as much as those poor devils who have nothing, and who then have that nothing taken away from them’

  'Without believing that it is the same?'

  Antonin smiled and gave an elegant shrug. 'Faith can achieve all things, my son.'

  4

  Faith or no faith, Brunetti realized he was no closer to knowing what had brought the priest to his office than he had been when the man arrived. He did know, however, that he was being set up by the priest to view him in a sympathetic light because of the way he had just spoken of the plight of the Congolese. But a stone would pity those afflicted people: indeed, Brunetti was curious about a man who seemed to believe that he was displaying some special sensibility by saying such things.

  Brunetti made no response. The priest remained motionless and silent, perhaps thinking his last remark - which had sounded like the worst sort of pious platitude to Brunetti - was sufficiently profound to merit only unspoken congratulation.

  Brunetti let the silence expand. He had no favours to ask of the priest, and so he let him sit. Finally Antonin said, 'As I told you, I'd like to ask you about my friend's son.'

  'Of course,' Brunetti answered neutrally, then, when Antonin did not continue, he asked, 'What has he done?'

  The priest pulled his lips together at this and shook his head, as if Brunetti had asked a question too difficult, or impossible, to answer. Finally he said, 'It's not that he's done anything. It's more that he's thinking of doing something.'

  Brunetti began to consider possibilities: the young man - he assumed he was young - could be considering a crime of some sort. Or he was involved with people it was dangerous to know. Perhaps he was caught up with drugs or the traffic in drugs.

  'What is it he's thinking of doing?' Brunetti finally asked.

  'Selling his apartment.'

  Brunetti knew his fellow Venetians were considered a house-proud people, but he was not aware that it had been made a crime to sell one. Well, not unless it did not belong to you, that is.

  He decided to interrupt Antonin here, or this back and forth could continue for more time than he would have patience for. 'Before we go on with this, perhaps you could tell me if this sale or anything to do with it is aiminal?'

  Antonin gave this some thought before he answered, 'Not strictly, no.'

  'I've no idea what that means.'

  'Of course, of course. It's his apartment, so he has the legal right to sell it’

  'Legal?' Brunetti asked, picking up on the priest's emphasis of the word.

  'He inherited it from his uncle eight years ago, when he was twenty. He lives there with his companion and their daughter.' 'Is it his or theirs?'

  'His. She moved in with him six years ago, but the apartment is in his name.'

  'But they're not married?' Brunetti assumed they were not, but it would be better to get this clear.

  'No.'

  'Does she have residence at the address where they're living?'

  'No,' Antonin said reluctantly. 'Why?'

  'It's complicated,' the priest said. 'Most things are. Why not?'

  'Well, the apartment where she was living with her parents belongs to IRE, and when her parents moved to Brescia, the contract passed to her, and she was allowed to stay there because she was unemployed and had a child.'

  'How long ago did her parents move?' 'Two years ago.'

  'When she was already living with this man?' 'Yes.'

  ‘I see,' Brunetti said neutrally. The houses and apartments owned and administered by IRE were supposed to be rented to the residents of Venice most in need of financial aid, but over the decades many of those people had turned out to be lawyers, architects, members of the city administration, or people who were related to employees of the public entity itself. Not only that, but many people who rented the apartments, often for derisory rents, managed to sublet them at a considerable profit. 'So she doesn't live there?'

  'No’ the priest answered. 'Who does?'

  'Some people she knows’ the priest answered. 'But the lease is still in her name?' 'I think so, yes.'

  'You think so or you know so?' Brunetti enquired mildly.

  Antonin could not disguise his irritation and snapped, 'They're friends, and they needed a place
to live.'

  Brunetti stopped himself from observing that, though this was a need common to most people, it was not generally answered by the chance to live in an apartment owned by IRE. He chose, instead, to ask more directly, 'Are they paying rent?'

  ‘I think so.'

  Brunetti took a deep breath and was careful to make it audible. The priest quickly added, 'Yes, they are.'

  What people earned at the expense of the city was not his concern, but it was always useful to know how they did so.

  As if sensing a truce, Antonin said, 'But that's not the problem. As I told you, it's that he wants to sell his apartment’

  'Why?'

  'That's it, you see’ the priest said. 'He wants to sell it to give the money to someone.'

  Brunetti immediately thought of usurers, gambling debts. 'To whom?' he asked.

  'To some charlatan from Umbria who's convinced him that he's his father’ Brunetti was about to ask if there were any reason the young man should believe this when the priest added, 'His spiritual father, that is.'

  Brunetti lived with a woman whose chief weapons were irony and, when escalation was forced upon her, sarcasm; over the years he had noticed his own increasing tendency to dip into the same arsenal. Thus he consciously restrained himself and asked only, 'Is this man a cleric of some kind?'

  Antonin brushed the question aside. ‘I don't know, though he presents himself as one. He's a swindler, that's what he is, who's convinced Roberto that he - this swindler - has some sort of direct line to heaven.'

  Whatever Geneva Convention still governed this conversation went unviolated by Brunetti, who did not point out that many of Antonin's fellow priests made a similar claim to that same direct line. Brunetti moved back in his chair and crossed his legs. There was something surreal in the scene, Brunetti realized, just as he knew that his sense of the absurd was acute enough to allow him to appreciate it. The priest's moral compass might not register a tremor at fraud committed against the city, but it was sensitive enough to be set atremble by the thought of money going to a belief system different from his own. Brunetti wanted to lean forward and ask the priest just how a person was meant to judge true belief from false, but he thought it wiser to wait and see what Antonin had to say. He worked to keep his face bland and thought that he succeeded.

  'He met him about a year ago’ Antonin continued, leaving it to Brunetti to work out the identity of the pronouns. 'He - Roberto, my friend Patrizia's son -was already mixed up with one of those Catecumeni groups.'

  'Like the one at Santi Apostoli?' Brunetti asked neutrally, mentioning a church which was used for meetings of a group of particularly unbuttoned Christians:

  Brunetti, who sometimes walked past as the sound of their evening services emerged, could think of no better adjective.

  'In the city, but not that group,' Antonin said.

  'Was this other man also a member?' Brunetti asked.

  'I don't know,' Antonin said quickly, as though this were an irrelevant detail. 'But what I do know is that, within a month of their meeting, Roberto was already giving him money.'

  'Would you tell me how you know this?' Brunetti asked.

  'Patrizia told me.'

  'And how did she know?'

  'Her son's companion, Emanuela, told her.'

  'And did she know because there was some sort of decline in the family's finances?' Brunetti asked, wondering why the man couldn't simply tell him what was going on and have done with it. Why did he wait for these repeated, minute questions? The memory flashed into Brunetti's mind of the last confession he had made, when he was about twelve. As he counted out his poor, miserable little-boy sins to the priest, he had become conscious of a mounting eagerness in the priest's voice as he asked Brunetti to explain in detail just what he had done and what he had felt while doing it. And an atavistic warning of the presence of something unhealthy and dangerous had sounded in Brunetti's mind, driving him to excuse himself and leave the confessional, never again to return.

  And here he was, decades later, in a parody of that same situation, though this time it was he who was asking the niggling questions. His mind wandered off to a consideration of the concept of sin and the way it forced people to divide action into good or bad, right or wrong, forcing them to live in a black and white universe.

  He had not wanted to provide his own children with a list of sins that had to be mindlessly avoided and rules that could never be questioned. Instead, he had tried to explain to them how some actions produced good and some bad, though he had been forced at times to regret that he had not chosen the other option with its easy resolution of every question.

  '... He's put it on the market. I told you: he says he wants to give the community the money and go and live with them.'

  'Yes, I understand that,' Brunetti lied. 'But when? What happens to this woman Emanuela? And their daughter?'

  'Patrizia has said that they can go and live with her -she owns her own apartment - but it's small, only three rooms, and four people can't live in it, at least not for very long.'

  'Isn't there anywhere else?' Brunetti asked, thinking of the apartment that belonged to IRE and the lease that was now in this woman Emanuela's name.

  'No, not without creating terrible problems,' the priest said, offering no explanation.

  Brunetti took this to mean the people living in the apartment had some sort of written agreement with her or were the sort who were sure to cause trouble if told to leave.

  Brunetti put on his friendliest smile and asked, in his most encouraging tone, 'You said this woman Patrizia's father is in the hospital where you're chaplain.' When Antonin nodded, he went on. 'What about his home? Is there a chance that they could live there? After all, he's the grandfather’ Brunetti said, as if to name the relationship was to make the offer inevitable.

  Antonin shook his head but gave no explanation, forcing Brunetti to ask, 'Why?'

  'He married again after his wife - Patrizia's mother -died, and she and Patrizia have never ... they've never got on.'

  'I see,' Brunetti murmured.

  To him, it seemed a relatively common story: a family was in danger of losing its home and had to find a place to live. Brunetti saw this as the major problem: a homeless child and her mother, an apartment which they might have to leave and another one to which they could not return. The solution was to find them a home, yet this seemed not to concern Antonin, or if it did concern him, it seemed to do so only because it was related to the sale of the young man's house.

  'Where is this apartment he inherited?'

  'In Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini. You look straight across at it when you come down the bridge. Top floor.'

  'How big is it?'

  'Why do you want to know all this?' the priest asked. 'How big is it?'

  'About two hundred and fifty square metres.'

  Depending on the condition, the state of the roof, the number of windows, the views, when the last restoration had been done, the place could be worth a fortune, just as easily as it could be a pit greatly in need of major work and major expenditure. But still worth a fortune.

  'But I have no idea what it could be worth. I don't know that sort of thing’ Antonin said after a long time.

  Brunetti nodded in apparent belief and understanding, though the discovery of a Venetian ignorant of the value of a piece of real estate would ordinarily trigger a phone call to Il Gazzettino.

  'Have you any idea how much money he's already given this man?' Brunetti asked.

  'No’ the priest answered instantly, then added, 'Patrizia won't tell me. I think it embarrasses her.'

  ‘I see’ Brunetti said. Then, trying to sound solemn, he went on, 'Too bad. Too bad for all of them.' The priest created two more creases in the cloth of his tunic. 'What is it you'd like me to do, Antonin?' Brunetti asked.

  Eyes still lowered, the priest answered, 'I'd like you to see what you can find out about this man.'

  'The one from Umbria?'

 
'Yes. Only I don't think he is’

  'Where do you think he's from, then?'

  'The South. Maybe Calabria. Maybe Sicily’

  'Um-hum’ was all Brunetti was willing to hazard.

  The priest looked at him, letting the cloth drop on to his lap. 'It's not that I recognize anything or know the dialects down there, only he sounds like the actors I hear in the films who are meridionali or who are playing the parts of men who come from there.' He tried to find a better way to explain this. 'I was out of the country so long, maybe I'm not an accurate judge any more. But that's what he sounds like, though only at times. Most of the time, he speaks standard Italian.' He gave a self-effacing snort and added, 'Probably better than I do.'

  'When did you have a chance to listen to him?' Brunetti asked, wondering if he had phrased the question innocuously enough.

  'I went to one of their meetings’ the priest answered. 'It was in the apartment of one of them, a woman whose whole family has joined. Over near San Giacomo dell'Orio. It started at seven. People came in. They all seemed to know one another. And then the leader, this man I mentioned, came in and greeted them all’

  'Was your friend's son there?'

  'Yes. Of course.'

  'Did you go with him?'

  'No,' Antonin answered, obviously surprised by the question. 'He didn't know me then.' Antonin paused a moment, then added, 'And I didn't wear my habit when I went’

  'How long ago was this?'

  'About three months.'

  'No talk of money?'

  'Not that night. No.'

  'But some other time?'

  'The next time I went,' Antonin began, apparently having forgotten saying he had gone to only one meeting, 'he spoke, this Brother Leonardo, about the need to help the less fortunate members of the community. That's what he called them, "less fortunate", as though it would hurt them to be called poor. The people there must have been prepared for this because some of them had envelopes, and when he said this they pulled them out and passed them forward to him.'

  'How did he behave when this happened?' Brunetti asked, this time with the real curiosity that was beginning to stir in him.