Quietly in Their Sleep

by Donna Leon

  It was Brunetti’s experience that dishonest people seldom managed to look innocent, but Messini looked both innocent and confused. ‘The Sacred Cross? You mean the nuns?’

  ‘There are also priests, I believe?’

  It seemed that this came as news to him. ‘Yes, I think there are,’ Messini said after a pause. ‘But only the nuns work in the nursing homes.’ His cigarette was burnt down almost to the filter. Brunetti saw him look at the floor, discard the idea rather than the cigarette, and then very carefully balance it upright on the unburnt end next to the match on the desk.

  ‘About a year ago, one of the sisters was transferred.’

  ‘Yes?’ Messini asked with mild interest, obviously confused by Brunetti’s change of topic.

  ‘She was moved from the nursing home in Dolo to one here in the city, the San Leonardo.’

  ‘If you say so, Commissario. I know little about the staffing.’

  ‘Other than the foreign nurses?’

  Messini smiled. He was back on comfortable ground with talk of the nurses.

  ‘I’d like to know if you know why she was transferred.’ Before Messini could say anything, Brunetti added, ‘You might consider your answer a sort of application fee, Dottor Messini.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘That makes no difference, Dottore. I’d like you to tell me what you know about the transfer of this sister. I doubt that she could be moved from one of your nursing homes to another without your having heard something about it.’

  Messini considered this for a moment, and Brunetti watched the play of emotion on the other man’s face as he tried to understand what peril lay before him for whatever answer he might give. Finally he said, ‘I have no idea what information you’re looking for, Commissario, but whatever it is, I can’t give it to you. All questions about staffing are handled by the chief of nursing. Believe me, if I could help you here, I would, but it’s not something I am concerned with directly.’

  Though it usually turned out that anyone who asked to be believed was lying, Brunetti thought that Messini was telling him the truth. He nodded and said, ‘This same sister left the nursing home some weeks ago. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’ Again, Brunetti believed him.

  ‘Why is it that the Order of the Sacred Cross aids in the running of your nursing homes, Dottore?’

  ‘That’s a long and complicated story,’ Messini said with a smile that someone else probably would have found entirely charming.

  ‘I’m in no hurry, Dottore. Are you?’ Brunetti’s smile was utterly without charm.

  Messini reached for his cigarette packet but put it back in his pocket without taking another one. ‘When I took over directorship of the first nursing homes eight years ago, they were run entirely by the order, and I was hired only as medical director. But as time passed, it became more and more evident that, if they continued to run them as a charity, they would be forced to close.’ Messini gave Brunetti a long stare. ‘People are so ungenerous.’

  ‘Indeed,’ was all Brunetti permitted himself.

  ‘In any case, I considered the financial plight of the institution – I was already committed to aiding the old and ill – and it was obvious to me that it could remain viable only if it became a private facility.’ Seeing that Brunetti was following, he continued, ‘And so there was a reorganization – what the world of business would probably call a privatization – and I became administrator as well as medical director.’

  ‘And the Order of the Sacred Cross?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The chief mission of the order has always been the care of the old, and so it was decided that they would remain as an integral part of the staff of the nursing homes, but they would remain as paid employees.’

  ‘And their salaries?’

  ‘Paid to the order, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti echoed, but before Messini could object to his tone, he asked, ‘And who receives those salaries?’

  ‘I have no idea. The Mother Superior, probably.’

  ‘To whom are the cheques made out?’

  ‘To the order.’

  Though Brunetti graced his answer with a polite smile, Messini was utterly disconcerted. None of this was any longer making sense to him. He lit another cigarette, placing the second match on the other side of the upright filter.

  ‘How many members of the order work for you, Dottore?’

  ‘That’s a question you’ll have to ask my bookkeeper. I would imagine about thirty.’

  ‘And what are they paid?’ Before Messini could summon up his bookkeeper again, Brunetti repeated the question, ‘And what are they paid?’

  ‘I think it’s about five hundred thousand lire a month.’

  ‘In other words, about a quarter of what a nurse would earn.’

  ‘Most of them aren’t nurses,’ Messini maintained. ‘They’re aides.’

  ‘And as they are members of a religious order, I imagine that you do not have to pay the government any taxes for their health or pension funds.’

  ‘Commissario,’ Messini said, anger welling up in his voice for the first time, ‘it seems that you know all this already, and so I don’t see the need to have me here to answer these questions. Further, if you are going to continue in this vein, I think it would be better if my lawyer were present.’

  ‘I have only one more question, Dottore. And I assure you that there is no need for your lawyer’s presence. I am not a member of the Guardia di Finanza, nor of the Guardia di Frontiere. Who you hire and how little you pay them is entirely your concern.’

  ‘Ask it.’

  ‘How many of your patients have left money to you or to the nursing home?’

  Though Messini was surprised by the question, he answered it quickly. ‘Three, I believe. I try to discourage it. The few times I learned that people were planning to do so, I spoke to their families and asked them to see that the person be persuaded to do otherwise.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you, Dottore. One might even say high-minded.’

  Messini had tired of games, and so he told the truth and told it sharply. ‘If one said that, one would be a fool.’ He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stamped it out with his toe. ‘Think what it would look like. At the first word of it, people would be lining up to take their relatives out and put them somewhere else.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Could you give me the name of one of the people you dissuaded? Of their relatives, that is.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Call them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as you leave here, Dottore. Before you have time to get to a telephone.’

  Messini didn’t even bother with the appearance of outrage. ‘Caterina Lombardi. Her family lives in Mestre somewhere. Her son’s name is Sebastiano.’

  Brunetti wrote it down. Looking up, he said, ‘I think that will be all, Dottore. I thank you for giving me your time.’

  Messini stood but didn’t extend his hand. Saying nothing, he went across the room and left the office. He did not slam the door.

  Before Messini could have left the Questura or used his mobile phone, Brunetti had spoken to the wife of Sebastiano Lombardi, who confirmed Dottor Messini’s story about having suggested they persuade her husband’s mother not to change her will in favour of the nursing home. Before she hung up, Signora Lombardi spoke with great praise of Dottor Messini and the humane and loving concern he had for all of his patients. Brunetti’s agreement was as effusive as it was false. And on that note, their conversation ended.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Brunetti decided to spend the rest of his afternoon in the Marciana Library, though he left the Questura without bothering to tell anyone where he was headed. Before taking his degree in law at the University of Padova, Brunetti had spent three years studying in the department of history at Cá Foscari, where he had been turned into a reasonably competent researcher, as much at home among the
many volumes in the Marciana as in the meandering aisles of the Archivio di Stato.

  As Brunetti walked up the Riva degli Schiavoni, Sansovino’s library came into sight in the distance, and as it always did, its architectural unruliness gladdened his heart. The great builders of the Serene Republic had had only manpower at their disposition: rafts, ropes, and pulleys, yet they had managed to create a miracle like that. He thought of some of the horrid buildings with which modern Venetians had defaced their city: the Bauer Grunwald Hotel, the Banca Cattolica, the train station, and he mourned, not for the first time, the cost of human greed.

  He came down off the last bridge and then out into the Piazza, and all gloom fled, driven off by the power of a beauty that only man could create. The spring wind played with the enormous flags flying in front of the Basilica, and Brunetti smiled to see how much more imposing was the lion of San Marco, raging across his scarlet field, than were the three parallel bars of Italy.

  He walked across the Piazza and under the Loggetta, then into the Library, a place which seldom saw a tourist, not the least of its many attractions. He passed between the two giant statues, showed his tessera at the reception window, and went into the reference hall. He searched the main catalogues for ‘Opus Dei’, and after a quarter of an hour had found references to four books and seven articles in various magazines.

  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 be
ak, 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.’