The Death of Faith (2 page)

‘I suppose they want to be sure that you are. Sure, that is,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Yes. It can take months, perhaps years. You’ve got to give them letters from people who know you and who think you’re able to make the decision.’

‘Is that what you’d like? Can I help you that way?’

She waved a hand to one side, flicking away his words and, with them, the vow of obedience. ‘No, it doesn’t matter. It’s finished. Over.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, although he didn’t.

She looked across at him, her gaze so direct and eyes so startling in their beauty that Brunetti felt a tinge of anticipatory envy for the man who would sweep away her vow of chastity.

‘I came because of the
casa di cura.
Because of what I saw there.’

Brunetti’s heart surged across the distance to his mother’s side, and he was immediately alert for any hint of peril.

But before he could form his terror into a question, she said, ‘No, Commissario, it’s not your mother. Nothing will happen to her.’ She paused then, embarrassed at how that sounded and at the grim truth contained in her words: the only thing that could ever again happen to Brunetti’s mother was death. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added lamely but said nothing more.

Brunetti studied her for a moment, confused by what she had said, but at a loss as to how to ask her what she meant. He remembered the afternoon of his most recent visit to his mother, wishing that he could somehow see the long-absent Suor’Immacolata, knowing that she was the only person who would understand the painful fullness of his soul. But instead of the lovely Sicilian, he had found in the hall only Suor’Eleanora, a woman whom the course of years had turned sour and to whom the vows meant poverty of spirit, chastity of humour, and obedience only to some rigorous concept of duty. The fact that his mother could be, even if for an instant, in the care of this woman enraged him as a man; the fact that the
casa di cura
was considered to be one of the best available shamed him as a citizen.

Her voice pulled him back from his long reverie, but he didn’t hear what she said and so had to ask, ‘I’m sorry, Suora,’ immediately conscious of how long usage had pulled her title from him. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

She began again, ignoring his use of her title. ‘I’m talking about the
casa di cura
here in Venice where I was working three weeks ago. But it isn’t only that I left, Dottore. I left the order, I left everything. To begin my . . .’ Here she paused and glanced out the open window, off to the facade of the church of San Lorenzo, seeking there the name of what she was about to begin. ‘My new life.’ She looked across at him and gave a small, weak smile. ‘
La Vita Nuova,’
she repeated but in a tone she struggled to make lighter, as if conscious of the heavy melodrama that had slipped into her voice. ‘We had to read
La Vita Nuova
in school, but I don’t remember it very well.’ She glanced across at him, eyebrows pulled together in interrogation.

Brunetti had no idea where this conversation was going; first there was talk of danger, and now of Dante. ‘We read it, too, but I think I was too young. I always preferred
La Divina Commedia,
anyway,’ he said. ‘Especially
Purgatorio.’

‘How strange,’ she said with interest, which might have been real or only an attempt to delay whatever it was she had come to tell him. ‘I’ve never heard anyone prefer that book before. Why?’

Brunetti allowed himself a smile. ‘I know, because I’m a policeman, people always assume I’d prefer
Inferno.
The wicked are punished and everyone gets what Dante thought they deserved. But I’ve never liked it, the absolute certainty of the judgements, all that awful suffering. Forever.’ She sat quietly, looking at his face and attending to his words. ‘I like
Purgatorio
because there’s still the possibility that things will change. For the others, whether they’re in Heaven or Hell, it’s all finished: that’s where they’ll be. Forever.’

‘Do you believe that?’ she asked, and Brunetti knew she wasn’t talking about literature.

‘No.’

‘No part of it?’

‘Do you mean if I believe that there’s a Heaven or a Hell?’

She nodded, and he wondered if some lingering superstition kept her from uttering the words of doubt.

‘No,’ he answered.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

After a very long pause, she said, ‘How very grim.’

As he had many times since he realized that this was what he believed, Brunetti shrugged.

‘I suppose we’ll find out,’ she said, but her voice was rich with possibility, not sarcasm or dismissal.

Brunetti’s impulse was again to shrug, for this was a discussion he had abandoned years ago, while still in university, laying aside the things of a child, out of patience with speculation and eager for life. But a glance at her reminded him that she was, in a sense, just out of the egg, about to begin her own
vita nuova,
and so this sort of question, no doubt unthinkable in the past, must be current and vital to her. ‘Perhaps it’s true,’ he conceded.

Her response was instant and fiery. ‘You don’t have to condescend to me, Commissario. I left my vocation behind me, not my wits.’

He chose neither to apologize nor to continue this accidental discussion of theology. He shifted a letter from one side of his desk to the other, pushed his chair back, and crossed his legs. ‘Shall we talk about that, instead?’ he asked.

‘About what?’

‘About the place where you left your vocation?’

‘The nursing home?’ she asked unnecessarily.

Brunetti nodded. ‘Which one are you talking about?’

‘San Leonardo. It’s over near the Giustiniani Hospital. The order helps to staff it.’

He noticed that she was sitting with her feet placed one beside the other, both flat on the floor, knees pressed together. She opened the bag with some difficulty and took from it a sheet of paper, unfolded it, and looked down at whatever was written there. ‘In the last year,’ she began nervously, ‘five people have died at San Leonardo.’ She turned the paper around and leaned forward to place it in front of him. Brunetti glanced down at the list.

‘These people?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I’ve given their names, their ages, and what they died of.’

He looked down at the list again and saw it gave exactly that information. There were the names of three women and two men. Brunetti recalled reading some sort of statistic that said women were supposed to live longer than men, but these had not. One of the women was in her sixties, the others in their early seventies. Both of the men were older. Two had died of heart attacks, two of strokes, and one of pneumonia.

‘Why have you given me this list?’ he asked, looking up at her.

Even though she must have been prepared for the question, she took some time to answer it. ‘Because you’re the only one who might be able to do something about it.’

Brunetti waited a moment for her to explain that remark, and when she didn’t, he said, ‘I’m not sure what “it” is.’

‘Can you find out what they died of?’

He waved the list in the air between them. ‘Other than what’s written here?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Yes. If what’s there isn’t true, is there any way that you can find out what they actually died of?’

There was no need for Brunetti to think before he answered: the law about exhumation was clear. ‘Not without an order from a judge or a request from the family, no.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I had no idea. I’ve been — I don’t know how to say this — I’ve been away from the world for so long that I don’t know how things work anymore, how things are done.’ She paused for a moment and added, ‘Perhaps I never knew.’

‘How long were you in the order?’ he asked.

‘Twelve years, ever since I was fifteen.’ If she saw his surprise, she ignored it. ‘That’s a long time, I know.’

‘But you weren’t really away from the world, were you?’ Brunetti asked. ‘After all, you trained as a nurse.’

‘No,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’m not a nurse. Well, not a trained or professional one, at any rate. The order saw that I had a . . .’ she stopped dead, and Brunetti realized she had found herself in the unaccustomed position of acknowledging a talent or giving herself a compliment and had no choice but to stop talking. After a pause that allowed her to remove any praise from her remarks, she continued, ‘They decided that it would be good for me to try to help old people, and so I was sent to work in the nursing homes.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘Seven years. Six out in Dolo, and then one at San Leonardo,’ she answered. That would have made Suor’Immacolata, Brunetti realized, twenty when she arrived at the nursing home where his mother was, the age when most women are getting jobs, deciding on professions, meeting lovers, having children. He thought of what those other women would have achieved in those years, and then he thought of what life must have been for Suor’Immacolata, surrounded by the howls of the mad and the smells of the incontinent. Had he been a man with a religious sense, a belief in some higher being, perhaps Brunetti could have taken consolation in the ultimate spiritual reward she would receive in return for the years she had given away. He turned from that thought and asked, setting the list down in front of him and smoothing it with the side of his hand, ‘What was unusual about the deaths of these people?’

She paused a moment before she answered, and when she did, she confused him utterly ‘Nothing. Usually we have a death every few months, sometimes more than that just after the holidays.’

Decades of experience in questioning the willing and the unwilling underlay the calm with which Brunetti asked, ‘Then why have you made out this list?’

‘Two of the women were widows, and the other one never married. One of the men never had anyone come to visit.’ She looked at him, waiting to be prodded, but still he said nothing.

Her voice grew softer, and Brunetti had a sudden fantasy of Suor’Immacolata, still in her black and white habit, struggling against the admonition never to spread slander, never to speak ill, even of a sinner. ‘I heard two of them,’ she finally said, ‘at one time or another, say that they wanted to remember the
casa di cura
when they died.’ She stopped at this and glanced down at her hands, which had abandoned the purse and now held one another in a death grip.

‘And did they do that?’

She shook her head from side to side but said nothing.

‘Maria,’ he said, casting his voice intentionally low, ‘does that mean they didn’t do it or you don’t know?’

She didn’t look up at him when she answered. ‘I don’t know. But two of them, Signorina da Prè and Signora Cristanti. . . both of them said that they wanted to.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Signorina da Prè said, one day after Mass — there’s no collection when Padre Pio says the Mass for us,
said
the Mass for us.’ Suddenly conscious of the confusion of tenses caused by her having left the order, she stopped. She reached a nervous hand up to her temple, and Brunetti saw her slide her fingers back, seeking the protective comfort of her wimple. But instead, her fingers encountered only her exposed hair, and she pulled them away as though they had been burned.

‘After the Mass,’ she repeated, ‘as I was helping her back to her room, she said that it didn’t matter that there was no collection, that they’d find out after she was gone how generous she had been.’

‘Did you ask her what she meant?’

‘No. I thought it was clear, that she had left them her money, or some of it.’

‘And?’

Again, she shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘How long after that did she die?’