by Donna Leon
'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.
'He looked surprised, though I don't see why he should have been’
Brunetti asked, 'Is it like this at all the meetings?'
Antonin raised a hand in the air. ‘I went to only one more, and the same thing happened then’
'I see, I see’ Brunetti muttered and then asked, 'And your friend's son, is he still going to these meetings?'
'Yes. Patrizia complains about it all the time.'
Ignoring the accusatory tone, Brunetti asked, 'Can you tell me anything more about this Brother Leonardo?'
'His surname is Mutti, and the mother house - if that's what it's called, and if there really is one - is somewhere in Umbria.'
'Are they associated with the Church in any way, do you know?'
'You mean the Catholic Church?' Antonin asked. 'Yes.'
'No, they're not.' His response was so absolute that Brunetti didn't pursue it.
After some time, Brunetti asked, 'What is it, precisely, that you'd like me to do?'
'I'd like to know who this man is and whether he's really a monk or a friar or whatever he says he is.' Brunetti kept to himself his surprise that the priest should want to farm out this research: wouldn't it be easier for a person who was, as it were, in the business to attend to something like this?
'Do they have a name?'
'The Children of Jesus Christ.'
'Exactly where in San Giacomo do they meet?'
'You know that restaurant to the right of the church?'
'The one with the tables outside?'
'Yes. There's a calle by the restaurant, first door on the left. The name on the bell is Sambo.'
Brunetti jotted this down on the back of an envelope on his desk. The man had sprinkled water on his mother's casket, and he had also gone to visit her in her last days, and so Brunetti felt himself in the priest's debt. 'I'll see what I can do,' he said and got to his feet.
The priest rose and put out his hand.
Brunetti took it, but the memory of the priest's fingernails made him glad that the handshake was brief and perfunctory. He took the priest to the door, then stood at the top of the steps and watched him walk down and out of sight.
5
Brunetti went back to his office, but instead of returning to his chair, he went and stood by the window. After a few minutes, the priest appeared two floors below, at the foot of the bridge leading over to Campo San Lorenzo, easily recognizable even from this acute angle by his long black skirts. As Brunetti watched, he started slowly up the steps of the bridge, lifting his skirts with both hands, reminding Brunetti of the way his grandmother fussed with the apron she sometimes wore. The priest reached the top of the bridge and let the hem of his tunic drop. He put one hand on the parapet and stood there for some time.
Moisture had condensed on the bridge that morning, and the dampness would surely cling to his long skirt. As Brunetti watched him walk down the other side and into the Campo, he recalled an observation Paola had once made, after a train trip from Padova to Venice when they had sat opposite a long-gowned mullah, busy with his prayer beads for the entire trip. His robes has been whiter than any businessman's shirt Brunetti had ever seen, and even Signorina Elettra would have envied the perfection of the pleats in his skirt.
As they walked down the steps of the station, the mullah moving gracefully off to his left, Paola said, 'If he didn't have a woman to take care of his costume for him, he'd probably have to go out and work for a living.' In response to Brunetti's observation that she was displaying a certain lack of multi-cultural sensitivity, she replied that half the trouble and most of the violence of the world would be eliminated if men were forced to do their own ironing, 'which word I use as a metonym for all housework, please understand,' she had hastened to add.
And who would disagree with her, he wondered? Brunetti, like most Italian men, had been spared the necessity of housework by the tireless labour of his mother, a background panel of his childhood, seen every day but never noticed. It was only when he did his military service that he had confronted the reality that his bed did not make itself each morning, nor did the bathroom clean itself. He had been lucky enough, after that, to marry a woman much given to what she called 'fair play', who conceded that her paltry hours of teaching allowed her sufficient time to see to some things in the house as well as the hiring of a cleaning woman to do the things she did not care for.
Brunetti gave himself a mental shake, and when the figure of the priest disappeared between the buildings on the other side of the canal, he went back to his desk. He looked at the top sheet of paper there, but soon his gaze drifted off as idly as did the clouds above the church of San Lorenzo. Who would know about this group or about their leader, Leonardo Mutti? He tried to think of anyone in the Questura who was of a religious persuasion, but something in him balked at asking them to make some sort of involuntary betrayal. He tried to summon up the name of anyone he knew who could be considered a believer or who had anything to do with the Church, but could think of no one. Was this a statement about his own lack of faith or of an intolerance he felt towards people who did believe?
He dialled his home number.
'Pronto’ Paola responded on the fourth ring.
'Do we know anyone religious?'
'In the business itself or a believer?'
'Either.'
'I know a few who are in the business, but I doubt they'd talk to someone like you,' she said, never one to spare his feelings. 'If you want someone who believes, you might try my mother.'
Paola's parents had been in Hong Kong when Brunetti's mother died; he and Paola had decided not to inform them or summon them home, not wanting to ruin what was said to be a holiday. Somehow, however, the Faliers had learned of Signora Brunetti's death but had succeeded in arriving only the morning after the funeral; Brunetti had seen them both and been warmed by the sincerity of their sympathy and the warmth of its expression.
'Of course,' Brunetti said. 'I'd forgotten.'
‘I think she forgets sometimes, too,' Paola said and set the phone down.
From memory, he dialled the home number of Count and Countess Falier and spoke to one of the Count's secretaries. After a few minutes' delay, he heard the Contessa say, 'How lovely to speak to you, Guido. What can I do for you?'
Did everyone in his family, he wondered, think that he could have no interest in them aside from police business? For a moment, he was tempted to lie and tell her he had called simply to say hello and ask how they were adjusting to jet lag, but he feared she would see through that and so he answered, 'I'd like to speak to you.'
He had come, after some years of hesitation and diffidence, to use the familiar tu when speaking to her and the Count, but it did not fall trippingly from his tongue. It was certainly less difficult with the Contessa, a fact which reflected his greater ease in dealing with her in every way.
'Whatever for, Guido?' she said, sounding interested.
'Religion,' he answered, hoping to su
rprise her.
Her answer was long in coming, but when she spoke, it was in an entirely conversational voice. 'Ah, from you, of all people.' And then silence.
'It has to do with an investigation,' he hastened to explain, though really this was not strictly the truth.
She laughed. 'Good heavens, you hardly have to tell me that, Guido.' Her voice disappeared for a moment, as though she had covered the receiver with her palm. Then she was back, saying, 'I've got someone here, but I could see you in an hour, if that's convenient.'
'Of course,' he said, glad of the chance this offered to be out and about. ‘I'll be there.'
'Good,' she answered with what sounded like real pleasure and replaced the phone.
He could have stayed and looked at papers, opened files and initialled them, busied himself with the documents that flooded from one side of his desk to the other in a pattern dictated by the tides of crime. Instead, he left the office and walked out to Riva degli Schiavoni and turned right into the midst of glory.
A ferry was passing and he studied the trucks on board, not finding it unusual for a moment that trucks filled with frozen vegetables or mineral water or, for that matter, cheese and milk, were constrained to take a ferryboat in the middle of their delivery route.
A herd of tourists came down the steps of the church, engulfing him briefly before the current of culture carried them down towards the Naval Museum and the Arsenal. Brunetti, who had been becalmed inside their close passage, bobbed in their wake for a few seconds and then set off again up towards the Basilica.
On his left he saw a metal stanchion, used by the boats of those sufficiently wealthy to pay the mooring fees and thus effectively block the view across to San Giorgio of anyone who lived on the lower floors of the buildings on his right. In the absence of a boat, he sat on the stanchion, looking across at the church, the angel, and then the other domes that hopscotched their way up the far side of the Giudecca Canal. He leaned back and wrapped his fingers around the metal edge, enjoying the warmth of it, and studied the way the point of the Salute divided the two canals, watching the boats entering and emerging from them.
His dark grey trousers soon absorbed the rays of the sun and he felt the heat on his thighs. He stood suddenly and brushed the heat away before continuing towards the piazza.
At Florian's, he went into the bar at the back and had a coffee, nodding to one of the barmen whom he recognized but could not place. It was after eleven, so he could have had un'ombra, but it was perhaps wiser to arrive at the palazzo smelling of coffee rather than wine. He paid and left, pausing for a moment to gear himself for the plunge into the tide of tourists. He thought of the Gulf Stream and his daughter's frequent reminders that it might be coming to a halt. Aside from Paola's worship of Henry James as a household deity, Chiara's interest in ecology was as close to a religion as anyone in the family came.
At times the world's equanimity in the face of the mounting evidence of global warming and its likely consequences alarmed him: after all, he and Paola had had good years, but if even a portion of what Chiara read was true, what sort of future awaited his children? What sort of future awaited them all? And why were so few people alarmed as the grim news kept piling up? But then he glanced to the right, and the facade of the Basilica drove all such thoughts from his mind.
From Vallaresso he took the Number One to Ca'Rezzonico and walked down to Campo San Barnaba. His dawdling had consumed the hour. He rang the bell beside the portone and soon heard footsteps coming across the courtyard. The immense door swung back and he stepped inside, knowing that Luciana, who had been with the Faliers for longer than he had known them, would have come to answer the door. Could she have grown so short in the time - how long had it been, a bit more than a year - since Brunetti had last seen her? He bent lower than he thought he had the last time and kissed her on both cheeks, took one of her hands and held it between his as they spoke.
She asked her questions about the children, and he answered them as he had been answering them ever since their birth: eating well, learning, happy, growing. What, he wondered, did Luciana know of global warming, and what would she care if she did?
'The Contessa is waiting to see you,' Luciana said, making it sound as if the other woman were waiting for Christmas. Then she quickly returned to the really important things: 'You're sure they're both eating enough?'
‘If they ate any more than they do, Luciana, I'd have to take a mortgage on the apartment and Paola would have to start taking in private students to tutor,' Brunetti answered, beginning an exaggerated list of what the kids could eat in one day, which left her laughing out loud with one hand held over her mouth to quiet the sound.
Still laughing, she led him across the courtyard and up into the palazzo, and Brunetti made sure the list lasted until they arrived at the corridor that led to the Contessa's study. She stopped there and said, 'I've got to get back to lunch. But I wanted to see you and know that everything's all right.' She patted his arm and turned towards the kitchen, which was at the back of the palazzo.
It always took Brunetti a long time to walk down this hallway because of the Goya etchings from the Disasters of War series. Here the man, just shot, and still hanging from the pole to which he was tied; the children, faces covered in horror; the priests, looking so much like vultures poised at the point of flight, their long necks similarly featherless. How could things this horrible be so beautiful?
He knocked at the door, then heard footsteps approaching. When it opened, Brunetti found himself looking down at another woman who appeared to have grown shorter overnight.
They kissed. Brunetti must have failed to hide his surprise, for she said, It's because I'm wearing low shoes, Guido. No need to worry that I'm turning into a little old lady. Well, littler old lady, that is.'
He looked at the Contessa's feet and saw that she was wearing what looked like a pair of trainers, but the sort on sale in Via XXII Marzo, complete with iridescent silver stripes down the sides. Above them was a pair of what looked like black silk jeans and a red sweater.
Before he could ask, she explained, 'I did a stretching exercise for my yoga class that must have been beyond me, and it seems I've inflamed a tendon. So it's children's shoes and no yoga for a week.' She gave a conspiratorial smile and added, ‘I confess I'm almost glad to be kept away from all that concentration and positive energy. There are times when it's so exhausting I can't wait to get home and have a cup of tea. I'm sure it's all very good for my soul, but it would be so much easier just to sit here and read something like Saint Teresa of Avila, wouldn't it?'
'Nothing serious, is it?' Brunetti asked, nodding towards her foot and choosing to avoid discussion of her soul for the moment.
'No, not at all, but thank you for asking, Guido,' she said, leading him over to the sofa and easy chairs that sat looking across the Grand Canal. She did not limp, but she walked more slowly than was her wont. From behind, she had the form and somehow managed to radiate the energy of a far younger woman, despite her silver hair. To the best of his knowledge, the Contessa had never had cosmetic surgery, or else she had had the best available, for the light wrinkles around her eyes added character, and not years, to her face.
Before they sat, she asked, 'Would you like anything to drink? Coffee?'
'No, thank you. Nothing at all.'
She did not insist. She patted the sofa where he liked to sit, because of the view, and took her own seat in one of the large chairs, her body all but disappearing between the high armrests. 'You wanted to talk about religion?' she asked.
'Yes,' Brunetti answered, 'in a way.'
'Which way?'
'I spoke to someone this morning who told me he was concerned about a young man who had fallen under the sway - please understand that these are his words, not mine - under the sway of a preacher of some sort, Leonardo Mutti, who is said to be from Umbria.'
Resting her elbows on the arms of the chair, the Contessa brought her latched fingers to just under
her chin and rested it on them.
'According to the person who spoke to me, this preacher is a fraud and is interested only in getting money from people, including this young man. The young man owns an apartment and is, I'm told, trying to sell it so as to be able to give the money to this preacher.'
When the Contessa said nothing, he went on, 'Because of your interest in religion and your' - he paused to find the proper word - 'faith, I thought it possible that you would have heard of this man.'
'Leonardo Mutti?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'May I ask what your involvement in all of this is?' she asked politely. 'And if you know either the young man or the preacher?'
‘I know the man who reported all of this to me. He was a friend of Sergio's when we were younger. I don't know the young man and I don't know Mutti.'
She nodded and turned her chin aside, as if considering what she had just been told. Finally she looked back at him and asked, 'You don't believe, do you, Guido?'
'In God?'
'Yes.'
In all these years, the only information he had had about the Contessa's beliefs had come from Paola, and all she had said was that her mother believed in God and had often gone to Mass while Paola was growing up. As to why Paola had, if anything, an adversarial relationship with religion, this had never been explained beyond Paola's maintaining that she had had 'good luck and good sense'.
Because it was not a subject he had ever discussed with the Contessa, Brunetti began by saying, 'I don't want to offend you.'
'By saying that you don't believe?'
'Yes.'
"That could hardly offend me, Guido, since I think it's an entirely sensible position.'
When he failed to hide his surprise, she said, her wrinkles contracting in a soft smile, 'I've chosen to believe in God, you see, Guido. In the face of convincing evidence to the contrary and in the complete absence of proof -well, anything a right-thinking person would consider as proof - of God's existence. I find that it makes life more acceptable, and it becomes easier to make certain decisions and endure certain losses. But it's a choice on my part, only that, and so the other choice, the choice not to believe, is entirely sensible to me.'
