by Donna Leon
‘Was, Commissario?’ he asked. ‘A woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’m afraid I can’t be much help to you. The Mother Superior could give you more information than I can. She is the spiritual mother of the sisters.’
‘I believe you know this woman, Father.’
‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Maria Testa.’
The priest’s smile was a completely disarming attempt to apologize for his own ignorance. ‘I’m afraid the name doesn’t mean anything to me, Commissario. Could you give me her name when she was still a member of our order?’
‘Suor’Immacolata.’
The priest’s face lit up with recognition. ‘Ah yes, she worked at the San Leonardo nursing home. She was a great help to the patients. Many of them loved her deeply, a feeling I think she returned. I was saddened to learn of her decision to leave the order. I’ve prayed for her.’ Brunetti nodded, and the priest went on, voice suddenly alarmed, ‘But what do the police want with her?’
This time it was Brunetti who extended a hand across the distance between them. ‘We’re merely asking some questions about her, Father. She hasn’t done anything, believe me.’ The priest’s relief was visible. Brunetti continued. ‘How well did you know her, Father?’
Padre Pio considered the question for several moments. ‘That’s difficult to answer, Commissario.’
‘I thought you were her confessor.’
The priest’s eyes opened wide at this, but he quickly glanced down to disguise his surprise. He folded his hands, considering what to say, and then looked back up at Brunetti. ‘I’m afraid this might seem needlessly complicated to you, Commissario, but it is important that I distinguish here between my knowledge of her as a superior in the order and my knowledge of her as her confessor.’
‘Why is that?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew.
‘Because I cannot, under pain of serious sin, reveal to you anything she has told me under the seal of confession.’
‘But those things you know as her religious superior, can you tell me those?’
‘Yes, certainly, especially if they will be of any help to her.’ He unfolded his hands, and Brunetti noticed one of them reach for the beads of the rosary that hung from his belt. ‘What is it you’d like to know?’ the priest asked.
‘Is she an honest woman?’
This time the priest made no attempt to hide his surprise. ‘Honest? Do you mean if she’d steal?’
‘Or lie.’
‘No, she’d never do either of those things.’ The priest’s answer was immediate and unqualified.
‘What about her vision of the world?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the question,’ he said with a small shake of his head.
‘Is she, do you think, an accurate judge of human nature? Would she be a reliable witness?’
After a long moment’s thought, the priest said, ‘I think that would depend on what she was judging. Or whom.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I think she is, well, I suppose “excitable” is as good a word as any. Or “emotional”. Suor’Immacolata is very quick to see the good in people, a quality beyond price. But,’ and here his face clouded, ‘she is often just as ready to suspect the bad.’ He stopped, measuring out the next words. ‘I’m afraid this next is going to sound terrible, like the worst sort of prejudice.’ The priest paused, evidently uncomfortable about what he was going to say. ‘Suor’Immacolata is from the South, and I think, because of that, she has a certain vision of mankind or of human nature.’ Padre Pio looked away and Brunetti saw the way his teeth caught at his bottom lip, as if he wanted to bite the offending part and thus punish himself for having said what he just had.
‘Wouldn’t the convent be a strange place to take that vision?’
‘You see?’ the priest said, obviously embarrassed. ‘I don’t know how to say what I want to say. If I could speak in theological terms, I’d say she suffers from lack of hope. If she had more hope, then I think she would have more faith in the goodness of people.’ He stopped talking and fingered his beads. ‘But I’m afraid I cannot say any more than that, Commissario.’
‘Because of the danger of revealing something to me that I shouldn’t know?’
‘That you can’t know,’ the priest said, voice filled with the ring of absolute certainty. When he saw the look Brunetti gave him, he added, ‘I know this seems strange to many people, especially in today’s world. But it is a tradition as old as the Church, and I think it is one of the traditions we strive most strongly to maintain. And must maintain.’ His smile was sad. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say more than that.’
‘But she wouldn’t lie?’
‘No. You can be sure of that. Never. She might misinterpret or exaggerate, but Suor’Immacolata would never knowingly lie.’
Brunetti got to his feet. ‘Thank you for your time, Father,’ he said, extending his hand.
The priest took it; his grasp was firm and dry. He accompanied Brunetti across the room and, at the door, said only ‘Go with God,’ in response to Brunetti’s renewed thanks.
As he emerged into the courtyard, Brunetti saw the gardener kneeling in the dirt beside the back wall of the monastery, hands digging at the roots of a rose bush. The old man saw Brunetti and pushed one hand flat on the ground in an attempt to push himself to his feet, but Brunetti called across to him, ‘No, Brother, I’ll let myself out.’ When he did that, the scent of the lilacs trailed him down the calle until he turned the first corner, following him like a benediction.
The next day, the current Minister of Finance visited the city, and even though it was an entirely personal visit, the police were still responsible for his safety while he was there. Because of this and because of a late winter outbreak of flu that had five policemen in bed and one in the hospital, the copies of the wills of the five people who had died at the San Leonardo Casa di Cura lay unnoticed on Brunetti’s desk until early the next week. He did manage to think about them, even asked Signorina Elettra about them once, only to receive the brisk reply that they had been placed on his desk two days before.
It was not until the Minister had returned to Rome and the Augean Stables of the Ministry of Finance that Brunetti thought again about the copies of the five wills, and he did that only because his hand fell upon them when he was searching his desk for some missing personnel files. He decided to take a look at them before giving them to Signorina Elettra and asking her to find some place to file them.
His university degree was in law, and so he was familiar with the language, the clauses which provided, bestowed, granted possession of bits and tatters of the world to people not yet dead. Reading through the cautious phrases, he could not help thinking of what Vianello had said about the impossibility of ever really owning anything, for here was proof of that impossibility. They had passed on the fiction of ownership to their heirs and had thus perpetuated that illusion, until more time passed, when the heirs too would have ownership stolen from them by death.
Maybe those Celtic chieftains had it right, Brunetti speculated, when they had all their treasure piled on a barge with their bodies and the whole thing set ablaze to drift to sea. It occurred to him that this sudden turning against material possessions was perhaps no more than a response to having spent time in the company of the Minister of Finance, a man so crass, vulgar, and stupid as surely to turn anyone against wealth. Brunetti laughed aloud at this and returned his attention to the wills.
Aside from that of Signorina da Prè, two of the wills mentioned the casa di cura. Signora Cristanti had left five million lire, certainly not an enormous sum, and Signora Galasso, who had given the bulk of her estate to a nephew in Torino, had left it two million lire.
Brunetti had worked for the police for too long not to know that people would kill for sums this small, and many quite casually, but he had also learned that few careful killers would risk detection for such trifles. It seemed unlikely, therefore, that these sums co
uld have served as sufficient motive for anyone involved with the casa di cura to be moved to take the risk of killing these old people.
Signorina da Prè sounded, from her brother’s description, like an abandoned old woman who had been moved, toward the end of her life, to act charitably toward the institution where she had spent her last lonely years. Da Prè had said no one had opposed his having contested his sister’s will. Brunetti could not imagine that anyone who would kill in order to inherit would allow their bequest so easily to be taken from them.
He checked the dates and saw that both the Lerini and Galasso wills that contained the bequests to the casa di cura had preceded their deaths by considerably more than a year. Of the remaining wills, two had been signed more than five years before death, and in the last case, twelve. It would take greater imagination and cynicism than Brunetti’s to invent a sinister scenario here.
The fact that nothing criminal had taken place made sense, though rather perverse sense, to Brunetti, for by imagining secret, malign events at the casa di cura, events which she alone could see, Suor’-Immacolata could thus justify her decision to leave the order that had been her spiritual and physical home from the time she was an adolescent. Brunetti had seen guilt present itself in stranger forms, surely, but he had seldom seen so little real reason for guilt. He realized that he did not believe her, and it filled him with heavy sadness that she would have so soured the beginning of her vita nuova. She deserved better of life, and of herself, than this dangerous invention.
The papers, copies of the five wills and the few notes he had sketched after his visits to the people he and Vianello had visited, found their way, not into the hands of Signorina Elettra, but into his bottom drawer, where they rested for another three days.
Patta returned from vacation, less interested in police work than when he left. Brunetti profited from this by making no mention of Maria Testa or her story. Spring advanced, and Brunetti went to visit his mother in the nursing home, a visit made more painful by his renewed awareness of the absence of the instinctive charity of Suor’Immacolata.
The young woman made no further attempt to contact him, and so Brunetti allowed himself to indulge in the virtue of hope, hope that she had abandoned her story, forgotten her fears, and begun her new life. Brunetti even went so far one day as to decide to go out to the Lido to visit her, but when he looked for the file, he couldn’t find it or the piece of paper with her address on it, nor could he remember the name of the people who had helped her find a job. Rossi, Bassi, Guzzi, a name that sounded something like that, Brunetti recalled, but then the irritation of Vice-Questore Patta’s return to the Questura caught up with him, and he forgot all about her until, two days later, he answered his phone and found himself speaking to a man who identified himself as Vittorio Sassi.
‘Are you the man that Maria talked to?’ Sassi asked.
‘Maria Testa?’ Brunetti asked in return, though he knew which Maria the man meant.
‘Suor’Immacolata.’
‘Yes, she came to see me a few weeks ago. Why are you calling me, Signor Sassi? What’s wrong?’
‘She’s been hit by a car.’
‘Where?’
‘Out here on the Lido.’
‘Where is she?’
‘They took her to the emergency ward. That’s where I am now, but I can’t get any information about her.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘Then why have you waited so long to call me?’ Brunetti demanded.
There was a long silence.
‘Signor Sassi?’ Brunetti said, and when he had no answer, he asked in a softer voice, ‘How is she?’
‘Bad.’
‘Who hit her?’
‘No one knows.’
‘What?’
‘She was going home from work late yesterday afternoon, on her bicycle. It looks like a car hit her from behind. It was going very fast. Whoever was driving didn’t stop.’
‘Who found her?’
‘A man in a truck. He saw her lying in a ditch at the side of the road. He brought her to the hospital.’
‘How bad is she?’
‘I don’t know, not really. When they called me this morning, they told me that one of her legs was broken. But they think there might be brain damage.’
‘Who thinks that?’
‘I don’t know. What I’m telling you is what the person I talked to on the phone told me.’
‘But you’re at the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did they know to get in touch with you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The police went to her pensione yesterday – her address was in her bag, I think – and the owner gave them my wife’s name. He remembered that we’d taken her there. But they didn’t bother to call me until this morning, and I came right over here.’
‘Why did you call me?’
‘When she went into Venice last month, we asked her where she was going, and she said she was going to talk to a policeman named Brunetti. She didn’t say what it was about, and we didn’t ask, but we thought, well, we thought that if you’re a policeman you’d want to know about what happened to her.’
‘Thank you, Signor Sassi. I’m very glad you called me,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘How has she been acting since she saw me?’
If Sassi thought this a peculiar question, his voice gave no hint of it. ‘Just the same as always. Why?’
Brunetti chose not to answer this and, instead, asked, ‘How long are you going to be there?’
‘Not much longer. I’ve got to get back to work, and my wife has the grandchildren.’
‘What’s the name of her doctor?’
‘I don’t know that, Commissario. It’s chaos out here. The nurses are on strike today, so it’s hard to find someone who will tell me anything. And no one seems to know anything about Maria. Can you come out here? Maybe they’d pay some attention to you.’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘She’s a very good woman,’ Sassi said.
Brunetti, who had known her for six years, understood fully how true those words were.
When Sassi hung up, Brunetti called down to Vianello and told him to get a pilot and a boat and be ready to leave for the Lido in five minutes. He had the operator connect him with the hospital at the Lido and asked to speak to the person in charge of the emergency ward. His call was transferred to gynaecology, surgery, and the kitchen before he hung up in disgust and ran down the steps to Vianello, Montisi, and the waiting launch.
As they surged across the laguna, Brunetti told Vianello about Sassi’s call.
‘Bastards,’ Vianello said when he heard about the hit-and-run driver. ‘Why didn’t they stop? Just leave her for dead at the side of the road.’
‘Maybe that’s what they wanted to do,’ Brunetti said and watched as the sergeant suddenly understood.
‘Of course,’ he said, eyes closing at the simplicity of it. ‘But we didn’t even go to the casa di cura to ask any questions. How would they know she’d talked to us?’ Vianello asked.
‘We don’t have any idea of what she’s done since she came to see me, do we?’
‘No, I suppose we don’t. But she couldn’t have been foolish enough to just go and accuse someone, could she?’
‘She’s been in a convent most of her life, Sergeant.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that she probably thinks it’s enough to tell someone that they’ve done wrong, and they’ll march down to the police, say they’re sorry, and hand themselves over.’ When he heard how flippant he sounded, Brunetti immediately regretted having spoken so lightly. ‘I mean she’s probably not a very good judge of character, and most motives wouldn’t make much sense to her.’
‘I suppose you’re right, sir. A convent probably isn’t the best preparation for this filthy world we’ve made.’
Brunetti could think of no response to make to th
is, so he said nothing until the boat pulled into one of the landings restricted for ambulances at the back of the Ospedale al Mare. They jumped from the boat, telling Montisi to wait until they had some idea of what was going on. A gaping door led to a white, cement-floored corridor.
A white-coated attendant came hurrying down it toward them. ‘Who are you? What are you doing down here? No one’s allowed to come into the hospital this way.’
Ignoring what he said, Brunetti pulled out his warrant card and flashed it at the man. ‘Where’s the emergency ward?’
He watched as the man thought about resisting or opposing them, but then he saw the usual Italian refusal to resist authority, especially uniformed authority, assert itself, and the man gave them directions. Within minutes, they were standing at a nurses’ desk, behind which double doors opened onto a long, brightly lit corridor. No one was at the desk, and no one answered Brunetti’s repeated calls for attention.
After a few minutes, a man in a rumpled white coat pushed his way out through the doors. ‘Excuse me,’ Brunetti said, holding up a hand to stop the man.
‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘How do I find out who’s in charge of the emergency room?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ the man asked in a harried voice.
Again, Brunetti pulled out his warrant card and showed it. The man peered at it and then back to Brunetti. ‘What is it you want to know, Commissario? I’m the person doomed to be in charge of this ward.’
‘Doomed?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Sorry. That’s an exaggeration. I’ve been here for the last thirty-six hours because the nurses have decided to go on strike. I’m trying to take care of nine patients with the help of one orderly and one intern. But I don’t think telling you all this is going to help me much.’
‘Sorry, doctor. I can’t arrest your nurses.’
‘Pity. How can I help you?’
‘I’ve come to see a woman who was brought in here yesterday. Hit by a car. I was told she has a broken leg and some damage to the brain.’
The doctor recognized the description immediately. ‘No, her leg’s not broken. It was her shoulder, and it’s only dislocated. And there are a few ribs that might be broken. But the head injury’s the thing I was worried about.’