by Donna Leon
Early on it was judged the wiser path of wisdom for membership in the order to remain secret. Though its members hotly and consistently denied that this made Opus Dei a secret society, a certain impenetrability about its goals and activities was strictly maintained, and no accurate estimate could be given of its membership. Brunetti assumed that the usual justification for this would pertain: the existence of some sort of ‘enemy’ which sought the destruction of the society — to make no mention of the moral order of the universe. Because of the political power of many of its members and because of the protection and support offered it by the current Pope, Opus Dei neither paid taxes nor underwent legal scrutiny by the various agencies of government in any of the countries in which it currently pursued its sacred mission. Of the many mysteries surrounding the society, its finances proved the most impenetrable.
He flipped quickly through the remainder of the first book, with its discussion of ‘numeraries’, ‘fidelities’, and ‘elect’, then paged through the second. There was a great deal of speculation, an even greater amount of suspicion, but there was very little fact. In a way, these books seemed to be little more than the opposite side of the bright, shiny coin offered by the supporters of the order: much passion but little substance.
He turned to the magazines but was immediately disconcerted by the discovery that all of the articles had been carefully razored out of the magazines. He carried them back across the main reading room. The librarian still sat at her desk, and two dusty scholars dozed on the banks of the pools of light shed by table lamps. ‘Some things have been cut out of these magazines,’ he said as he put them down in front of her.
‘The anti-abortion people again?’ she asked with no surprise but considerable distress.
‘No, the Opus Dei people.’
‘Much worse,’ she said calmly and reached across to pull the magazines toward her. As she opened each, it fell open at the missing pages. She shook her head at the signs of destruction and at the care that had been taken to do it. ‘I don’t know if we have the money to keep buying replacement copies of all of them,’ she said as she placed the magazines aside gently, as if reluctant to cause them further pain.
‘Is this common?’
‘Just in the last few years,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s become the latest form of protest. They destroy any article that contains information they disapprove of. I think there was a movie like this, years ago, something about people burning books.’
‘Fahrenheit 451. At least we don’t do that,’ Brunetti said, trying with a smile to convey this minimum comfort.
‘Not yet,’ she said and turned her attention to one of the scholars who had approached her desk.
Out in the Piazza, Brunetti stood and looked out over the Bacino of San Marco, then turned and studied the ridiculous domes of the Basilica. He had read once about some place in California where the swallows return every year on the same date. St Joseph’s Day? Here, it was much the same, for the tourists all seemed to reappear in the second week of March, led by some inner compass that brought them to this particular sea. Each year, there were more and more of them, and each year the city made itself more and more hospitable to them rather than to its citizens. Fruit dealers closed, shoemakers went out of business, and all seemed transformed into masks, machine-made lace, and plastic gondolas.
Brunetti recognized this as his most unpleasant mood, no doubt exacerbated by his encounter with Opus Dei, and knew that, to counter it, he had to walk. He set off back along the Riva degli Schiavoni, water to his right, hotels to his left. By the time he got to the first bridge, moving quickly under the late afternoon sun, he felt better. Then, when he saw the tugboats pulled up to the riva, lined up and in order, each with its Latin name, he felt his heart lift up and sail over toward San Giorgio in the wake of a passing vaporetto.
The sign for Ospedale SS Giovanni e Paolo decided him, and twenty minutes later he found himself there. The nurse in charge of the floor to which Maria Testa had been moved told him that there was no change in her condition and said that she had been moved to a private room, Number 317, just up the corridor and around to the right.
Outside Room 317 Brunetti found an empty chair and, on it, lying face down, the current issue of Topolino. Without thinking, without knocking, Brunetti opened the door to the room and went inside, where instinct pulled him swiftly to the side of the still-closing door as his eyes flashed around the room.
A blanket-covered form lay on the bed, tubes running up and down to plastic bottles above and below. The same thick bandage that enwrapped her shoulder was still in place, as was the one that swathed her head. But the person Brunetti saw when he approached the bed seemed a different one: her nose had been honed down to a thin beak, her eyes had sunk deeper into her skull, and her body almost didn’t show beneath the covers, so thin had she become in just this short time.
Brunetti, as he had the last time, studied her face, hoping it would reveal something. She breathed slowly, with such a long pause between breaths that Brunetti began to fear that the next one would never come.
He glanced around the room and saw no flowers, no books, no sign of human occupancy. Brunetti found that strange and then was struck by the sadness of it. She was a beautiful woman at the dawn of her life, trapped and unable to do little more than breathe, and yet there was no evidence that anyone in the world was aware of that fact, nor that there existed a single soul who suffered at the thought that the dawn would never come.
Alvise, newly engrossed in his reading, sat in the chair outside the room and didn’t bother to look up when Brunetti emerged.
‘Alvise,’ Brunetti said.
He looked up absently from the comic and, recognizing Brunetti, pushed himself instantly to his feet and saluted, the comic still in his hand. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Where were you?’
‘I kept falling asleep, sir, so I went down to get a coffee. I didn’t want to fall asleep and let an intruder into the room.’
‘And while you were away, Alvise? Didn’t it occur to you that someone might have gone in while you were away?’
Had he been stout Cortez, silent, on a peak in Darien, Alvise could have been no more astounded by this suggestion. ‘But they would have had to know when I was away.’
Brunetti said nothing.
‘Wouldn’t they, sir?’
‘Who assigned you here, Alvise?’ Brunetti asked.
‘There’s a roster in the office, sir; we come over here by turns.’
‘When will you be relieved?’
Alvise tossed the comic onto his chair and looked at his watch. ‘At six, sir.’
‘Who’s replacing you?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I just look at my own assignments.’
‘I don’t want you to leave this place again before you’re relieved.’
‘Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.’
‘Alvise,’ Brunetti said, pushing his face so close to Alvise’s that he could catch the sharp odour of coffee and grappa on the man’s breath, ‘if I come back here and I find you either sitting or reading, or not here in front of this door, you will be dismissed from the force so fast you won’t even have time to explain it to your union steward.’ Alvise opened his mouth to object, but Brunetti cut him off ‘One word, Alvise, one word and you’re finished.’ Brunetti turned and walked away.
* * * *
He waited till after dinner to tell Paola that the name of Opus Dei had entered into this investigation. He did this not from uncertainty about her discretion but because he dreaded the inevitable pyrotechnics of her response to the name. They came long after dinner, when Raffi had gone to his room to finish his Greek homework and Chiara to read, but when they came, they were no less explosive for having been delayed.
‘Opus Dei? Opus Dei?’ Paola’s opening salvo soared across the living room, from where she sat sewing a button onto one of his shirts, and struck at Brunetti, slumped down in the sofa with his feet crossed in front of him on the lo
w table. ‘Opus Dei?’ she shouted again, just in case one of the children hadn’t heard. ‘Those nursing homes are mixed up with Opus Dei? No wonder old people are dying; they’re probably being killed so their money can be used to convert some heathen savages to Holy Mother Church.’ Decades with Paola had accustomed Brunetti to the extremity of most of her positions; they had also taught him that, on the subject of the Church, she was immediately incandescent and seldom lucid. And never wrong.
‘I don’t know that they’re mixed up in it, Paola. All I know is what Miotti’s brother said, that there is talk the chaplain is a member.’
‘Well, isn’t that enough?’
‘Enough for what?’
‘Enough to arrest him.’
‘Arrest him for what, Paola? That he disagrees with you on matters of religion?’
‘Don’t be smart with me, Guido,’ she threatened, aiming the needle in her hand at him to show how serious she was.
‘I’m not being smart. I’m not even trying to be. I can’t go out and arrest a priest just because there’s a rumour he belongs to a religious organization.’ He knew that, in Paola’s vision of justice, little more evidence of crime was necessary, but he refrained from making this observation, judging the time inappropriate.
It was clear from her silence that Paola had to accept the truth of what he said, but the vigour with which she stabbed the needle through the cuff of his shirt gave evidence of how much she resented that fact. ‘You know they’re power-hungry thugs,’ she said.
‘That might well be true. I know that many people believe it, but I have no first-hand evidence of it.’
‘Oh, come on, Guido, everyone knows about Opus Dei.’
He sat up straighter and crossed his legs. ‘I’m not sure they do.’
‘What?’ she asked, shooting him an angry glance.
‘I think everyone thinks they know about Opus Dei, but it is, after all, a secret society. I doubt that anyone outside of the organization knows very much about it, or about them. Or at least not anything that’s true.’
Brunetti watched Paola as she considered this, the needle quiet in her hand as she continued to stare down at the shirt. Though she was violent on the subject of religion, she was also a scholar, and it was this part that caused her to look up and across at him. ‘You may be right.’ She grimaced at her own admission and then added, ‘But isn’t it strange that so little is known about them?’
‘I just said they’re a secret society.’
‘The world is full of secret societies, but most of them are a joke: the Masons, the Rosicrucians, all those Satanic cults the Americans are always inventing. But people are really afraid of Opus Dei. The way they were afraid of the SS, the Gestapo.’
‘Paola, wouldn’t you say that’s an extreme position?’
‘You know I can’t be rational on this subject, so don’t ask me to be, all right?’ Neither spoke for a moment, and then she added, ‘But it really is strange; the way they’ve managed to create such a reputation about themselves while still managing to remain almost entirely secret.’ She set the shirt aside and stuck the needle into the pincushion that sat beside her. ‘What is it they want?’
‘You sound like Freud,’ Brunetti said with a laugh. ‘ “What do women want?’“
She laughed at the joke: contempt for Freud and all his works and pomps was part of the intellectual glue that held them together. ‘No, really. What do you think it is they really want?’
‘Beats me,’ Brunetti was forced to admit. Then, after he had considered it for a while, he answered, ‘Power, I suppose.’
Paola blinked a few times and shook her head. ‘That’s always such a frightening idea for me, that anyone would want it.’
‘That’s because you’re a woman. It’s the one thing women believe they don’t want. But we do.’
She looked up, half-smiling, thinking this was another joke, but Brunetti, straight-faced, continued, ‘I mean it, Paola. I don’t think women understand how important it is for us, for men, to have power.’ He saw that she was going to object, but he cut her off. ‘No, it’s got nothing to do with womb envy. Well, at least I don’t think it does — you know, feeling we’re inadequate because we don’t have babies and have to make it up in other ways.’ Brunetti paused, never having articulated this, not even to Paola. ‘Maybe it’s no more than that we’re bigger, so we can get away with pushing other people around.’
‘That’s terribly simplistic, Guido.’
‘I know. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.’
She shook her head again. ‘I just can’t understand it. In the end, no matter how much power we have, we get old, we get weak, and we lose it all.’
Brunetti was suddenly struck by how much she sounded like Vianello: his sergeant argued that material wealth was an illusion, and now his wife was telling him that power was no more real. And what did that make him, the gross materialist yoked between two anchorites?
Neither of them spoke for a long time. Finally Paola glanced at her watch, saw that it was after eleven, and said, ‘I’ve got an early class tomorrow.’ At her hint, Brunetti stood, but even before she could get to her feet, the phone rang.
She started to get up to answer, but Brunetti moved more quickly, certain that it would be Vianello or someone from the hospital. ‘Pronto,’ he said, mastering both fear and excitement and keeping his voice calm.
‘Is this Signor Brunetti?’ a strange woman’s voice asked.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Signor Brunetti, I need to speak to you,’ she began in a rush. But then, as though her spirit had been deflated, she paused for a moment and then said, ‘No, could I speak to Signora Brunetti, instead?’
The tension in her voice was so strong that Brunetti didn’t dare ask who it was, for fear that she would hang up. ‘One minute, please. I’ll get her,’ he said and set the phone down on the table. He turned to Paola, still seated on the sofa, looking up at him.
‘Who is it?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘I don’t know. She wants to talk to you.’
Paola came to the table and picked up the receiver. ‘Pronto,’ she said.
Not knowing what to do, Brunetti turned to walk away, but then he felt Paola’s hand snap out and grab his arm. She shot one quick glance toward him, but then the woman on the other end said something, and Paola’s attention was pulled away from him and she released him.
‘Yes, yes. Of course you can call.’ Paola, as was her habit, started to play with the coiled wire of the phone, wrapping it around her fingers in a series of living rings. ‘Yes, I remember you from the meeting with the teachers.’ She pulled the wires from her left fingers and began to wrap them around the right ones. ‘I’m very glad you called. Yes, I think it was the right thing to do.’
Her hands grew still. ‘Please, Signora Stocco, try to stay calm. Nothing’s going to happen. Is she all right? And your husband? When will he be back? The important thing is that Nicoletta’s all right.’
Paola glanced up at Brunetti, who raised his eyebrows interrogatively. She nodded twice, though he had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and shifted her weight to lean against him. He put an arm around her and continued to listen to her voice and the sharp crackle from the other end of the line.
‘Of course, I’ll tell my husband. But I don’t think he can do anything unless you . . .’ The voice cut her off. It went on for a long time.
‘I understand, I understand completely. If Nicoletta’s all right. No, I don’t think you should talk to her about it, Signora Stocco. Yes, I’ll speak to him tonight and call you tomorrow. Could you give me your number, please?’ Leaning away from him, she jotted down a number and then asked, ‘Is there anything I could do for you tonight?’ She paused and then said, ‘No, of course it’s no trouble. I’m very glad you called.’
Another pause, and then she said, ‘Yes, I’d heard rumours, but nothing definite, nothing like this. Yes, yes, I agree. I’ll talk to my husband about it an
d I’ll call you tomorrow morning. Please, Signora Stocco, I’m glad to be of help in any way I can.’ More sounds from the other end.
‘Try to get some sleep, Signora Stocco. The important thing is that Nicoletta is all right. That’s all that matters.’ After another pause, Paola said, ‘Of course you can call again if you want to. No, it doesn’t matter what time it is. We’ll be here. Of course, of course. You’re welcome, Signora. Good night.’ She replaced the receiver and turned to him.
