The Death of Faith (28 page)

When he handed his written requests to the librarian, she smiled and asked him to take a seat, saying it would take about twenty minutes to accumulate the materials. He made his way to a seat at one of the long tables, walking silently in this place where even the turning of a page was an intrusion. While he waited, he pulled down one of the Loeb Classical Library volumes completely at random and began to read the Latin text, curious to see how much of that language, if any, remained. He had chosen the letters of Pliny the Younger and paged through it slowly, looking for the letter describing the eruption of Vesuvio in which the writer’s uncle had lost his life.

Brunetti was half-way through that account, marvelling at how little interest the writer appeared to take in what had come to be considered one of the great events of the ancient world and at how much of the language of that world he had managed to retain, when the librarian approached and set a pile of books and magazines down beside him.

He smiled his thanks, returned Pliny to his dusty seclusion, and turned his attention to the books. Two of them appeared to be tracts written by members of Opus Dei or, at least, by people favourably disposed both toward the organization and its mission. Brunetti glanced through them quickly, found that their enthusiastic rhetoric and incessant talk of ‘holy mission’ set his teeth on edge, and pushed them aside. The other two were more antagonistic in stance, and because of that, they were also more interesting.

Founded in Spain in 1928 by Don Josemaria Escriva, a priest with pretensions to noble blood, Opus Dei was dedicated to recapturing, or so it would seem, political dominion for the Catholic Church. One of its avowed purposes was the extension of Christian principles, and with them, Christian power, into the secular world. In order for this to be achieved, members of the order were dedicated to spreading the doctrines of both order and Church in their places of work, their homes, and the larger society in which they lived.

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 low 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?’