by Donna Leon
‘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 any more, 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?’
‘Three months.’
‘Did she say this to anyone else, about the money?’
‘I don’t know. She didn’t talk to many people.’
‘And the other woman?’
‘Signora Cristanti,’ Ma
ria clarified. ‘She was much more direct. She said that she wanted to leave her money to the people who had been good to her. She said it to everyone, all the time. But she wasn’t ... I don’t think she was able to make that decision, not really, not when I knew her.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She wasn’t very clear in her mind,’ Maria answered. ‘At least not all of the time. There were some days when she seemed all right, but most days she wandered; thought she was a girl again, asked to be taken places.’ After a moment’s pause, in an entirely clinical voice, she added, ‘It’s very common.’
‘Going back into the past?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. Poor things. I suppose the past is better for them than the present. Any past.’
Brunetti remembered his last visit to his mother but pushed the memory away. Instead, he asked, ‘What happened to her?’
‘Signora Cristanti?’
‘Yes.’
‘She died of a heart attack about four months ago.’
‘Where did she die?’
‘There. At the casa di cura.’
‘Where did she have the heart attack? In her room or in some place where there were other people?’ Brunetti didn’t call them ‘witnesses’, not even in his mind.
‘No, she died in her sleep. Quietly.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said, not really meaning it. He allowed some time to pass before he asked, ‘Does this list mean you think these people died of something else? Other than what’s written by their names?’
She looked up at him, and he was puzzled by her surprise. If she had got so far as to come to see him about this, surely she must understand the implications of what she was saying.
In an obvious attempt to stall for time, she repeated, ‘Something else?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, she said, ‘Signora Cristanti never had any trouble with her heart before.’
‘And the other people on this list who died of heart attacks or strokes?’
‘Signor Lerini had a history of heart trouble,’ she said. ‘No one else.’
Brunetti looked down at the list again. ‘This other woman, Signora Galasso. Did she have trouble with her health before?’
Instead of answering him, she began to run one finger along the top of her bag, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Maria,’ he said and paused after he said her name, waiting for her to look up at him. When she did, he continued, ‘I know it’s a serious thing to bear false witness against your neighbour.’ That startled her, as if the devil had started to quote the Bible. ‘But it is important to protect the weak and those who can’t protect themselves.’ Brunetti didn’t remember that as being in the Bible, though he thought it certainly should be. She said nothing to this, and so he asked, ‘Do you understand, Maria?’ When she still didn’t answer, he changed the question and asked, ‘Do you agree?’
‘Of course, I agree,’ she said, voice edgy. ‘But what if I’m wrong? What if this is all my imagination and nothing happened to those people?’
‘If you believed that, I doubt you would be here. And you certainly wouldn’t be dressed the way you are.’ As soon as he said it, he realized that it sounded like deprecation of the way she was dressed, though his words referred only to her decision to leave the order and remove her habit.
Brunetti pushed the list to the side of his desk and, in a verbal equivalent of that gesture, changed the subject. ‘When did you decide to leave?’
If she had been waiting for the question, her answer could have come no more quickly. ‘After I spoke to the Mother Superior,’ she said, voice rough with some remembered emotion. ‘But first I spoke to Padre Pio, my confessor.’
‘Can you tell me what you said to them?’ Brunetti had been away from the Church and all its works and pomps for so long that he no longer remembered just what could and could not be repeated about a confession or what the penalty for doing so was, but he remembered enough to know that confession was something people were not supposed to talk about.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Is he the same priest who says Mass?’
‘Yes. He’s a member of our order, but he doesn’t live there. He comes twice a week.’
‘From where?’
‘From our chapter house, here in Venice. He was my confessor in the other nursing home, too.’
Brunetti saw how willing she was to be diverted by details, and so he asked, ‘What did you tell him?’
She paused a moment, and Brunetti imagined she was remembering her conversation with her confessor. ‘I told him about the people who had died,’ she said and stopped, looking away from him.
When he saw that she was going to say nothing further, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you say anything else, anything about their money or what they had said about it?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know about it then. That is, I hadn’t remembered it then, I was so troubled by their deaths, so that’s all I said to him, that they had died.’
‘And what did he say?’
She looked at Brunetti again. ‘He said that he didn’t understand. And so I explained it to him. I told him the names of the people who had died and what I knew of their medical histories, that most of them had been in good health and had died suddenly. He listened to everything I had to say and asked me if I was sure.’ In a casual aside, she added, ‘Because I’m Sicilian, people up here always assume I’m stupid. Or a liar.’
Brunetti glanced at her to see if there was some reprimand, some comment on his own behaviour hidden in this remark, but there seemed to be none. ‘I think he just couldn’t believe it, that it was possible. Then, when I insisted that so many deaths were not normal,’ she continued, ‘he asked me if I was aware of the danger of repeating such things. Of the danger of causing slander? When I told him that I was aware of that, he suggested I pray about it.’ She stopped.
‘And then?’
‘I told him that I had prayed, that I had prayed for days. Then he asked me if I knew what I was suggesting, what a horror it was.’ She stopped again and then added as an aside, ‘He was shocked. I don’t think he could understand the possibility. He’s a very good man, Padre Pio, and very unworldly.’ Brunetti smothered a smile at hearing this said by someone who had spent the last twelve years in a convent.
‘What happened then?’
‘I asked to speak to the Mother Superior.’
‘And did you?’
‘It took two days, but she finally saw me, late one afternoon, after Vespers. I repeated everything to her, about the old people dying. She couldn’t hide her surprise. I was glad to see that because it meant Padre Pio hadn’t said anything to her. I knew he wouldn’t, but what I had said was so terrible, well, I didn’t know ...’ Her voice trailed away.
‘And?’ he asked.
‘She refused to listen to me, said she would not listen to lies, that what I was saying would damage the order.’
‘And so?’
‘She told me, ordered me, under my vow of obedience, to keep full silence for a month.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does, that you were not to speak to anyone for a month?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about your work? Didn’t you have to speak to the patients?’
‘I wasn’t with them.’
‘What?’
‘The Mother Superior ordered me to spend my time in my room and in the chapel.’
‘For a month?’
‘Two.’
‘What?’
‘Two,’ she repeated. ‘At the end of the first month, she came to see me in my room and asked if my prayers and meditations had shown me the proper path. I told her that I had prayed and meditated – and I had – but that I was still troubled by the deaths. She refused to listen and told me to resume my silence.’
‘And did you?’
She nodded.
‘And then?’
‘I spent the next week in prayer, and that’s when I began to try to remember anything t
hose people had told me, and that’s when I remembered what Signora da Prè and Signorina Cristanti had said to me, about their money. Before that, I wouldn’t let myself think about it, but once I did, I couldn’t stop remembering.’
Brunetti considered the wide variety of things she might have ‘remembered’ after more than a month of solitude and silence. ‘What happened at the end of the second month?’
‘The Mother Superior came to my room again and asked me if I had come to my senses. I said that I had, which I suppose is true.’ She stopped talking and again gave Brunetti that sad, nervous smile.
‘And then?’
‘And then I left.’
‘Just like that?’ Immediately, Brunetti began to consider the practical details: clothing, money, transportation. Strangely enough, they were the same details that had to be considered by people who were about to be released from prison.
‘That same afternoon, I walked out with the people who had been there for visiting hours. No one seemed to think it was strange; no one noticed. I asked one of the women who was leaving if she could tell me where I could buy some clothing. All I had was seventeen thousand lire.’
She stopped speaking and Brunetti asked, ‘And did she tell you?’
‘Her father was one of my patients, so she knew me. She and her husband invited me to go back to their home with them for supper. I had no place to go, so I went. To the Lido.’
‘And?’
‘On the boat, I told them what I’d decided to do, but I didn’t say anything about the reason. I’m not sure I even knew, or know now. I wasn’t slandering the order or the nursing home. I’m not doing that now, am I?’ Brunetti, who had no idea, shook his head and she continued. ‘All I did was tell the Mother Superior about the deaths, that it seemed strange to me, so many of them.’
In an entirely conversational tone, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve read that old people sometimes die in a series, with no reason.’
‘I told you that. It’s usually right after the holidays.’
‘Could that be the explanation here?’ he asked.
Her eyes flashed in what Brunetti believed was anger. ‘Of course it could be. But then why did she try to silence me?’
‘I think you told me that, Maria.’