by Donna Leon
‘Trouble, sir?’
‘If he’s ever been arrested or charged with anything. Or if he’s been transferred often. In fact, see if you can find out where his last parish was and why he was sent here.’
Almost under her breath, she said, ‘The Swiss banks would be easier.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘It’s very difficult, to get this sort of information.’
‘But if he’s been arrested?’
‘Things like that have a way of disappearing, sir.’
‘Things like what?’ Brunetti asked, interested by her bland tone.
‘Things like when priests are arrested. Or when they drop into the public eye. Just remember that sauna in Dublin. How quickly did that drop out of the papers?’
Brunetti remembered the story that had appeared last year, though only in Manifesto and L’Unità, about the Irish priest who had died of a heart attack in a gay sauna in Dublin, given the last rites by two other priests who happened to be there at the same time. The story, a source of howling delight to Paola, had disappeared after a single day, and this from the leftist press.
‘But certainly police files are different,’ he maintained.
She glanced up and gave him a smile similar in its compassion to those Paola often used to end an argument. ‘I’ll get his name and have a look, sir.’ She flipped to a new page. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Brunetti said and left her office, returning slowly to his own.
During the few years Signorina Elettra had worked at the Questura, Brunetti had become familiar with her sense of irony, but she could still say things that managed to leave him absolutely puzzled yet too embarrassed to ask for clarification, as had just happened with her remark about priests. He had never discussed religion or the clergy with Signorina Elettra, but, upon examination, he found that he believed her opinion wouldn’t be much wide of Paola’s.
Back in his office, he put thoughts of Signora Elettra and Holy Mother Church from his mind and reached for the phone. He dialled Lele Bortoluzzi’s number, and when the painter answered on the second ring, Brunetti said he was calling about Doctor Messini again.
‘How did you know I was back, Guido?’ Lele asked.
‘Back from where?’
‘England. I had a show in London and just got back yesterday afternoon. I was going to call you today.’
‘Call me about what?’ Brunetti asked, too interested in this to bother with polite questions about the success of Lele’s exhibit.
‘It seems that Fabio Messini likes the ladies,’ Lele answered.
‘As opposed to the rest of us who don’t, Lele?’
Lele, whose reputation in the city had been well known in his youth, laughed at this. ‘No, I mean, he likes the company of young women and is prepared to pay for it. And it seems he’s got two of them.’
‘Two?’
‘Two. One here in the city, in an apartment for which he pays the rent, a four-room apartment near San Marco, and another one out on the Lido. Neither of them works, but both of them dress very well.’
‘Is he the only one?’
‘Only one who what?’
‘Visits them,’ Brunetti said euphemistically.
‘Hummm, I didn’t think to ask that,’ Lele said, his voice showing that he regretted this oversight. ‘They are both very beautiful, it is said.’
‘Is it? And who says this?’
‘Friends,’ Lele answered cryptically.
‘What else do they say?’
‘That he visits each of them two or three times a week.’
‘How old is he, did you say?’
‘I didn’t say, but he’s my age.’
‘My, my,’ Brunetti said in a neutral voice and then, after a pause, asked, ‘Did they happen, your friends, to say anything about the nursing home?’
‘Homes,’ Lele corrected him.
‘How many are there?’
‘There seem to be five of them now, the one over here and four of them out on the mainland.’
Brunetti didn’t say anything for so long that Lele finally asked, ‘Guido, are you still there?’
‘Yes, yes, Lele, I am.’ He thought a moment and then asked, ‘Did your friends know anything else about the nursing homes?’
‘No, only that the same religious order works in all of them.’
‘The Sisters of the Sacred Cross?’ he asked, naming the order that ran the nursing home where his mother was and of which Maria Testa was no longer a member.
‘Yes. In all, five of them.’
‘Then how does he own them?’
‘I didn’t say that. I don’t know if he actually owns them or if he’s just the director. But he’s in charge of all of them.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said, already planning his next move. ‘Thank you, Lele. Did they say anything else?’
‘No,’ Lele answered in a dry voice. ‘Is there any other way I can be of use, Commissario?’
‘Lele,’ Brunetti said, ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry. You know how I am.’
Lele, who had known Brunetti since he was born, certainly did. ‘Forget it, Guido. Come and visit sometime, all right?’
Brunetti promised that he would, said a warm goodbye, hung up the phone, immediately forgot the promise, and picked up the phone again, asking the police operator to find the number and connect him with the San Leonardo Casa di Cura, somewhere over by the Ospedale Giustiniani.
A few minutes later, he was speaking to the secretary of Dottor Messini, the director of the nursing home, and setting up an appointment at four that afternoon in order to discuss the transfer of his mother, Regina Brunetti, to that facility.
* * * *
Chapter Eleven
Even though the area of the city around the Giustiniani Hospital was not far from Brunetti’s home geographically, it was an area of the city with which he was not very familiar, no doubt because it did not stand between his home and any of the parts of the city where he would ordinarily have cause to go. He found himself over there only when he had occasion to pass through it on his way out to the Giudecca or occasionally, on a Sunday, when he and Paola went out to the Zattere to sit in the sun at one of the waterside cafes and read the papers.
What he knew of the area was as much legend as fact, as was so much of the information he and his fellow Venetians tended to have about their city. Behind that wall was the garden of the former movie star, married now to the industrialist from Torino. Behind that one was the home of the last of the Contradini family, rumoured not to have left the house in twenty years. And that was the door to the house of the last of the Dona Salvas, who used to be seen only at the opening night of the opera, always in the royal box, and then always dressed in red. He knew these walls and doors as other children could recognize the heroes of cartoons and television, and like those figures, these houses and palazzi spoke to him of youth and a different vision of the world.
Just as children outgrew the antics of Topolino or Braccio di Ferro and came to realize the illusion behind them, Brunetti had, over the course of his years as a police officer, come to learn the often dark realities that lurked behind the walls of his youth. The actress drank, and the industrialist from Torino had twice been arrested for beating her. The last of the Contradinis had indeed been inside for twenty years, kept behind a broad wall into the top of which glass fragments had been embedded and cared for by three servants who did nothing to contradict his belief that Mussolini and Hitler were still in power and the world thus saved from the filthy Jews. And the Dona Salva; few people realized that she had gone to the opera in the belief that she received there vibrations from the spirit of her mother, who had died in the same box sixty-five years before.
The nursing home stood behind yet another high wall. A bronze plaque announced its name and stated that visiting hours were from nine until eleven in the morning, every day of the week. After he rang the bell, Brunetti stepped back a few paces, but he could se
e no glass embedded into the top of the wall. It wasn’t likely that anyone in a nursing home would have the strength to climb that wall, glass or not, Brunetti admonished himself, and the old and infirm had nothing but their lives that could any longer be stolen from them.
The door was opened by a white-habited nun who came to no higher than his shoulder. Instinctively, he bent down to speak to her and explained, ‘Good afternoon, Sister, I have an appointment with Dottor Messini.’
She looked up at him with puzzled eyes. ‘But the doctor is here only on Mondays,’ she said.
‘I spoke to his secretary this morning, and I was told I could come at four to discuss transferring my mother here.’ He glanced down at his watch in an attempt to disguise his displeasure. The secretary had been precise about the time of the appointment, and Brunetti was irritated to find no one here.
She smiled, showing Brunetti for the first time how very young she was. ‘Oh, then you must have an appointment with Dottoressa Alberti, the Vice-Director.’
‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti agreed amiably.
She stepped back and allowed Brunetti to come through the door and into a large square courtyard that had a capped well in the centre. In the sheltered space, rose plants were already in heavy bud, and he could smell the sweet scent of a dark lilac that bloomed in one corner. ‘It’s very beautiful here,’ he volunteered.
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she said, turning and leading him toward a doorway on the other side of the courtyard.
As they crossed the sun-filled courtyard, Brunetti saw them in the shadows created by the overhanging balcony that covered two sides of the courtyard. Lined up in a single row like a drawn-out momento mori, they sat, six or seven of them, motionless in their wheelchairs, staring ahead with eyes as hollow as those of Greek icons. He walked in front of them, but none of the old people registered his passing or paid any attention to him.
Inside the building, Brunetti found the walls a cheerful light yellow, all with railings running along them at waist height. The floors were spotless, marred only by the occasional tell-tale black scuff marks made by the rubber treads of wheelchairs.
‘Down here, please, sir,’ the young nun said, turning off to a corridor on their left. He followed her, having time only to note that what appeared to have once been the main banqueting hall, frescoed and chandeliered, still served that purpose, but did so now by means of formica-topped tables and moulded plastic chairs.
The nun stopped outside a door, knocked once, and hearing something from inside, opened it and held it open for Brunetti to enter.
The office into which Brunetti stepped had a row of four tall windows that gave out onto the courtyard, and the light that swept in bounced up from small flecks of mica in the Venetian pavement, filling the room with a magic glow. Because the single desk was placed in front of the windows, it was difficult for Brunetti at first to distinguish the person sitting behind it, but when his eyes grew accustomed to the light streaming up at him, he made out the form of a heavy-set woman in what looked like a dark smock.
‘Dottoressa Alberti?’ he asked, moving a bit forward and to the right so as to stand in a patch of shadow cast by a piece of wall that separated the windows.
‘Signor Brunetti?’ she said, rising from her desk and coming around the side of it toward him. His first impression had been correct: she was a large woman, almost his height and probably close to his weight, most of which had settled on her shoulders and hips. Her face was round and high-coloured, the face of a woman who enjoyed food and drink. She had a surprisingly small nose, turned up at the end. Her eyes were amber and wide-spaced and certainly her best feature. Her smock was merely a successful attempt to drape her body in dark wool.
He extended his hand and shook hers, surprised to find it one of those dead-hampster hands that so many women used in place of a handshake. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Dottoressa, and grateful that you could find time to talk to me.’
‘It’s part of our contribution to the community,’ she said simply, and it took Brunetti a moment to realize that she was entirely serious.
When Brunetti was seated in the chair in front of her desk and had refused her offer of coffee, he explained that, as he had told her secretary on the phone, he and his brother were considering moving their mother to the San Leonardo but wanted to know something about it before they decided to take that step.
‘San Leonardo was opened six years ago, Signor Brunetti, blessed by the Patriarch, and staffed by the excellent sisters of the Order of the Sacred Cross.’
Brunetti nodded here, as if to suggest that he recognized the habit of the nun who had shown him into this office.
‘We are a mixed facility,’ she said.
Before she could go on, Brunetti said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that means, Dottoressa.’
‘It means that we have patients who are here as clients of the national health service, which is responsible for their upkeep. But we also have private patients. Could you tell me which sort of patient your mother would be?’
Long days spent in the halls of bureaucracy, earning for his mother the right to the treatment that forty years of his father’s work had earned her, had made Brunetti fully aware that she was a patient who was covered by the state health service, but he smiled at Dottoressa Alberti and said, ‘She’d be a private patient, of course.’
At this news, Dottoressa Alberti seemed to expand and fill an even larger space behind her desk. ‘You realize, of course, that it makes no difference whatsoever in the way our patients are treated. We merely like to know so as to facilitate matters of billing.’
Brunetti nodded and smiled as if he believed her.
‘And your mother’s health?’
‘Fine. Fine.’ She seemed less interested in this answer than in the previous one.
‘When were you and your brother thinking of moving her?’
‘We thought that we’d like to do it before the end of the spring.’ Dottoressa Alberti did her smiling and nodding when she heard this. ‘Of course,’ Brunetti added, ‘I wouldn’t like to do this until I had some idea of the facilities you offer.’
‘Of course,’ Dottoressa Alberti said, reaching to the left of her desk, where there lay a thin folder. ‘I have all the information here, Signor Brunetti. It contains a full list of the services available to our patients, a list of our medical staff, a short history of the facility and the Order of the Sacred Cross, and a list of our patrons.’
‘Patrons?’ Brunetti asked politely.
‘Those members of the community who have seen fit to speak well of us and who have permitted us to use their names. As a kind of recommendation of the high quality of care which we provide our patients.’
‘Of course. I understand,’ Brunetti said, measuring out a nod. ‘And is there a list of your prices in there?’
Dottoressa Alberti, if she found this in any way brusque or tasteless, kept her opinion to herself and gave Brunetti an answering nod.
‘Would it be possible for me to have a look around, Dottoressa?’ When he saw her surprise, he added, ‘To try to get an idea if our mother would be happy here.’ As he said this, Brunetti turned away from her, as if interested in the books that lined her walls. He didn’t want Dottoressa Alberti to see any evidence on his face of the double lie: his mother would never come to this facility, just as she would never again be happy.
‘I see no reason why one of the sisters can’t take you through the facility, Signor Brunetti, at least through parts of it.’
‘That would be very kind of you, Dottoressa,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet with a pleasant smile.
She pushed a button on her desk, and after a few minutes, the same young nun came into the office without knocking. ‘Yes. Dottoressa?’ she said.
‘Sister Clara, I’d like you to take Signor Brunetti and show him the day room and the kitchen, and perhaps one of the private rooms, as well.’
‘There’s one last thing, Dottoressa,’ he sai
d, adding it as though he had just remembered it.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘My mother is a very religious woman, very devout. If it’s at all possible, I would like to have a few words with the Mother Superior.’ When he saw her begin to object, he hurried on. ‘It’s not that I have any uncertainties; I’ve heard nothing but praise about San Leonardo’s. But I did promise my mother that I’d speak to her. And I can’t lie to her if I don’t.’ He made his smile boyish, pleading with her to understand his situation.
‘Well, it’s not common,’ she began. She turned to Sister Clara. ‘Do you think it’s possible, Sister?’