The Girl of his Dreams - Brunetti 17 (4 page)

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 w
ith 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 ordi
narily 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.

'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.