Sister Agatha

by Domhnall O'Donoghue

  Today, Sister Agatha hoped that she would be in a position to continue this spirited murdering tradition. When in Venice, after all!

  As she waited for the barista to work his magic, she noticed the onslaught of pesky pigeons who appeared to be hell-bent on wreaking havoc for anyone who set foot on the square—boldly marking their territory and forcibly demanding to be fed. But the winged rodents, as Sister Consuela would always refer to them, didn’t bother Sister Agatha in the slightest, even as they loitered around her feet or perched themselves on her little table. In fact, not even an earthquake would have been able to interfere with the pleasure she got from being surrounded by so many architectural treasures.

  As the beautifully mannered waiter arrived with her second coffee and second amaretto biscuit, Sister Agatha couldn’t help but release a giddy laugh. She was now just a hair’s breath away from being the oldest person in the world and, almost equally as exciting, she was in Venice, the Bride of the Sea, drinking a cappuccino and watching the hordes of tourists dart about eating gelati with one hand while taking photographs of themselves with the other.

  The past number of days had the makings of a three-act opera, but Sister Agatha had a feeling that the best was yet to come. And while she was soon to go the way of all flesh, like Pompeii some seven-hundred-and-forty kilometres due south, she was absolutely adamant that she was going to go out with a bang.

  Sister Agatha knew that there was work to be done, but couldn’t resist taking a brief stroll around Venice’s web of narrow vie, and in terms of exercise, she was getting value for money having to cross the endless amount of bridges that linked one of these streets to another.

  The surreal, film-like atmosphere of the city gave way to her imagining herself as some wealthy noblewoman living in one of the luxurious palazzi that dotted the city. What a sight she would have been, kitted out in a ridiculous dress replete with luscious velvet and precious silk, with an ornate mask partially covering her face to top it all off! How the sisters in the convent would have laughed! (Sister Concepta, on the other hand, might have actually cried. Such a scene would surely have brought back painful memories of the time when the ten Venetian-styled dresses she had spent close to a year making for a school production of Othello had been thrown in a skip by the overzealous caretaker—all because she had made the grave mistake of storing them in a black bag.)

  Just as she was indulging in this frivolous fantasy, Sister Agatha passed a costumier’s shop; its sizeable windows filled with the splendid dresses and accoutrements about which she had just been daydreaming. Battling temptation, she hovered around the doorway: did she dare discard the armour that had served her so well for nearly a hundred years in favour of something more fabulous, say?

  “It’s time to break a habit of a lifetime,” she joked as she crossed the threshold into a store, which was so enchanting, Sister Agatha was convinced that Marie Antoinette would have given every person in both France and Italy a lifetime supply of cake in return for its contents. (Besides, she had noticed something malodorous since her arrival in the city, and she wasn’t sure if was the canals or the clothes that had been glued to her body for several days.)

  However, as Sister Agatha waded through the sea of fabrics within and caught sight of the price tags, the high spirits that she had initially felt soon dissipated, and in its place came a heavy and guilty heart. While she couldn’t have become the second-oldest person in the world—and in a few hours, with the help of God, the oldest—without a budget, her biggest regret since fleeing Navan five days earlier was having to pillage the convent’s coffers, particularly as she had seen first-hand how much effort they had put into raising such an impressive amount of money for Sister Josephine’s kitchen. Just because it was a necessary evil didn’t mean that she had to be proud of her actions.

  And so, she decided there and then that before she expired, she was going to find some way of paying back every cent. But until the moment arrived, she was determined to return to the disciplined thriftiness she had been so proud of over the past number of days. No more eighteen euro coffees and certainly no expensive dresses such as the ones in which she was currently surrounded.

  Steadfast in her decision, she turned on her heels and marched towards the exit, but a shop assistant stopped her before she could find her way back to the street. Holding aloft the most beautiful dress that Sister Agatha had ever laid her eyes on—a floor-length, taffeta ball gown, with an embroidered corset and layers upon layers of delicate lace ruffles—the assistant gestured for her try it on in the dressing room behind her.

  “Lo provi pure,” she insisted.

  Well, there was no harm in accepting the offer only to try it on, was there? No, there most certainly wasn’t, Sister Agatha convinced herself, before disappearing behind the curtain to investigate if she would indeed have made for a convincing gentildonna.

  * * *

  Vivienne Taylor took her first breath in Darwin, Australia, on Christmas Eve, 1974, the same day Cyclone Tracy had kicked up a storm in the city. Almost like a tribute to the environment in which she was born, Vivienne then spent the following forty-odd years she remained on earth causing irreparable damage to the lives of almost everyone she crossed. Throughout history, some have suggested that people are born good, others bad. If that was indeed the case, it was extremely obvious in which category Vivienne fell.

  When she was just twelve years of age, Vivienne had been playing in a pool in her back garden when she noticed her neighbour busily tending to his lilies next door. Wanting money to bring with her on an upcoming school tour—devil may care, she waltzed over to him and ripped off part of her bikini.

  “If you don’t give me five dollars, I am going to tell my parents that you did this to me.”

  The neighbour was absolutely stunned, and even though he had absolutely minus interest in pre-pubescent girls, he didn’t want to take his chances with Vivienne’s father who was known throughout the town for his violent behaviour. He fished out his wallet and gave his accuser the money she demanded.

  Delighted at the ease in which she had increased her funds, Vivienne felt certain that she had found her calling in life. Over the following years, her piggy bank prospered while the reputations of innocent men did not.

  When Vivienne reached her thirties, the determined entrepreneur thought it was high time she upskilled and expanded her business. She got herself a job as a maître d’ on a luxurious yacht that travelled in and out of Venice. Long gone were the days when she was bartering over five dollars; now, discussions revolved around sums that involved at least four digits (or, if such numbers weren’t readily available, Vivienne made do with their wives’ diamonds and pearls instead).

  This chicanery continued for a handful of years, but like plenty of successful business people, complacency and arrogance eventually set in and Vivienne started punching above her weight (of which she now had a lot more; decadence comes with a price, she discovered, and the older she had gotten, the more difficult Vivienne found it to prevent all of those bottles of champagne, and platters of oysters and caviar, from going unnoticed).

  After she had secretly filmed herself and a wealthy Polish rock-star called Pawel Dragon doing the fandango in his cabin, as his art-loving fiancée was visiting the Museo Correr, Vivienne demanded two hundred thousand euro to keep mum. Seeing as he was just months away from marrying into a family whose head had fought so bravely on behalf of Poland, there was simply no way that Pawel was just going to bow down and acquiesce willy-nilly.

  That night, as the future Mrs Dragon was being seduced by the music of home-boy Vivaldi in one of the churches somewhere, Pawel arranged to meet his blackmailer at the Venetian Arsenal, a cluster of shipyards and armories that offered suitable privacy for what the Pole had intended to do.

  Armed with a pistol, as she always was, Vivienne waited by the Porta Magna—the brightly lit entrance—trying to silence the roars of her gut, which was telling her that something was amiss. When
twenty minutes passed, and Pawel still hadn’t shown up, that initial anxiety turned to fury.

  “How dare he be so arrogant as to make a fool of me (and he with such bad breath)?”

  Vivienne was about to take to her heels and walk back to the cruise ship where some scandalous beans were going to be spilled, but before she could put one foot in front of the other, she heard a whistle from someone onboard a small boat in a nearby canal.

  “I have your money,” the voice cried out.

  It was Pawel. Vivienne marched over in his direction and was about to give him what for when she felt a blow to the back of the head, then nothing.

  When Vivienne came to some time later, her mouth was now taped, while her two hands were handcuffed to the rail of a boat, in which she sat alone. It bobbed up and down on the lagoon, away from its main thoroughfare but, she hoped, still within some rescuer’s range of vision.

  After a few moments, Vivienne noticed a speedboat coming in her direction: was it friend or foe? she questioned. The answer soon became apparent when it slowly pulled up beside her, and in it sat Pawel, holding Vivienne’s very own pistol in his hand.

  He jumped into the boat and positioned himself directly opposite her, and even though his presence meant only one thing, Vivienne was surprised at how calm she felt—almost as if she had expected this day to come. Even when he dangled the pistol in front of her face, she barely flinched (his stinky breath was more of an issue). But, Pawel didn’t shoot her; instead, he shot a hole in the floor of the boat.

  “It was nice doing business with you,” he said, almost spitting the words in her face before returning to his own means of transport and speeding off.

  As her boat slowly disappeared under the surface of the lagoon, Vivienne’s final thoughts focused not on her downfall, but rather the windfall she had accumulated over the decades and what might come of it all if ever her secret stash was unearthed.

  For somebody in Vivienne’s occupation, opening a mainstream savings account in which she could squirrel away her booty was not really an option. So, ever the pragmatist, she decided to tuck it all away in the lining of a big, flouncy, period dress that she had found in the back of a wardrobe in her rented apartment. At the time, she took comfort in the fact that the gaudy outfit comprised of so many layers of material that not even the city’s venerated Marco Polo would have either the expertise or the patience to discover what she had hidden within it.

  However, as the boat sank lower and lower, she now feared that she may have been too clever for her own good. Vivienne estimated that she had accumulated well over a million euro as a result of a lifetime being engaged in questionable deeds—more than enough for her benefactor to transform his or her life, she felt. But how would they find it? Maybe her old landlord would flog the dress to some local costumier who would, in turn, sell it to some kind charitable soul who would, in turn, put it to good use by helping those in need—a nun, perhaps?

  Well aware that she was in no position to be making plea bargains with the man above, nonetheless, Vivienne stormed heaven and quickly rattled off a short prayer—her first since her childhood years. She begged whoever might be listening to allow the considerable swag to find its way into the right hands.

  That her life of crime might soon benefit others gave Vivienne great comfort as she took her last breath, before vanishing under the lagoon’s murky waters.

  * * *

  Following a quick trip to a bank where she made something of a sizeable deposit into the account of the Order of Saint Aloysius—thanks to the boundless generosity of Lady Luck and the welcome forgetfulness of the money’s previous owner—a debt-free and, more importantly, conscience-free Sister Agatha, decked out in her splendid new outfit, boarded her second vaporetto of the day. (How Meath’s River Boyne could benefit from such additions, she mused.) Having happily played the role of the doting tourist for the past number of hours (the splendid Rialto Bridge overlooking the famed Grand Canal was especially pleasant to visit), it was now time to return to the business at hand.

  Her final destination was Lido, an affluent island just a short ferry ride from the city of Venice. Even with the limited Italian that she possessed, Sister Agatha knew that the island’s name translated as “beach”, and she wondered if time might allow for it, would she get an opportunity to dip her feet into the Adriatic Sea? She was of the opinion that the salt would work wonders on her protruding bunions.

  Hoping that her new, showy apparel would turn the odd head or two from fellow passengers aboard the ferry, she became disappointed that the only attention it received was from one over-friendly dog. The little poodle became so comfortable amongst the vast layers of materials that Sister Agatha suspected he was on the verge of marking his new-found territory. She had little interest in rocking up to her fourth and final victim smelling like poor Sister Mildred after the Alzheimer’s had kicked in, so she quickly swatted the curious canine away.

  For locals, such journeys were simply a means of getting from A to B. For Sister Agatha and, she suspected, every other visitor of the Floating City, it was akin to a five-star cruise—without those exorbitant prices to boot! Over the twenty-minute duration, she stood facing Venice and allowed the sun to shine on her skin, although not so much that she couldn’t look and admire the splendid Saint George’s Island or the assertive golden bronze wind vane aloft the Dogana di Mare, both of which didn’t lose a smidge of their grandeur the further the vaporetto moved away from them.

  If this particular visitor were to make a complaint, however, it would be related to the abrupt manner in which the ferry pulled into the various stops. Unaware that the captains took their inspiration from bumping cars at a funfair, it was almost a case of “Nun overboard!” on more than one occasion. Just as she became convinced that she was going to be forced to transform herself into a fish and swim the remainder of the journey, the ferry finally reached Lido, and Sister Agatha was, once again, reunited with steady land. (Thank God!)

  It only took the visitor a short number of steps to ascertain that the lively and elegant island possessed many fine assets, notably a lengthy coastline and a portfolio of lavish villas. And, as she remembered reading in one of those glossy magazines that Sister Regina had confiscated from a couple of unfocused Leaving Certificate students, it was also home to one of the most talked-about celebrations of celluloid in the world: the Venice Film Festival. But Sister Agatha wasn’t on the lookout for Hollywood’s finest; her only interest was in another—the world’s oldest.

  She wanted to take his life and then take his title.

  As she emerged from the ferry terminal, a resolute Sister Agatha quickly hailed a taxi and set off to finish the job she had started five days earlier in Tunisia.

  * * *

  Despite the fact that Riccardo Trentini had walked the earth longer than anyone else alive (in more recent times, slowly hobbled across its surface would have been a more accurate description), there was unusually very little known about the world’s oldest man, particularly during his early years. In all the articles that documented his remarkable existence, there appeared to be a consensus that the one-hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old’s story had started when he arrived in Florence, the art capital of the world, at the young age of twenty. Here, in the city that Michelangelo’s David called home, Riccardo had worked as an apprentice sculptor in the studio of a respected master for just over four years, learning his trade and honing his craft.

  From there he went to Venice, following his mentor who had received a generous commission from a wealthy politician to create a sculpture of his family, a job that had taken well over a year to finish. (This was largely thanks to Signor De Benedetto’s daughter’s somewhat protruding nose, which was, much to her dismay, the size of the boot of Italy.) But a single day was all that he needed to know that Venice was the place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

  There had been no wives, no children, and no fortune—just love for his work, which had proven
to be extremely fruitful in his newly-adopted home. The commissions, and later exhibitions, had come fast and furious with many observers feeling that Riccardo was only missing a good manager or art dealer, seeing as the sculptor himself had been grossly undercharging for his work. But Venice’s adopted son had never wanted for much in life—so long as he had enough money for a drop of Limoncello at the end of a long day at the studio, he was more than happy. After all, the sculptor had been gifted the most magnificent talent: for what more could he ask?

  When he marched into his eighty-fifth year, however, Riccardo’s body suddenly decided that it had had its fill of life on top of a ladder, chiselling away at marble and clay. On the instructions of his doctor, he moved to a well-respected residential home for the elderly in the nearby island of Lido, a place where he was expected to stay on a temporary basis. While the owners were initially informed that the prognosis wasn’t encouraging, the stubborn artist had been there ever since—a whopping thirty-six years later!

  Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so after reams of red-tape had conveniently disappeared out of harm’s way, the owner of the Stella della Laguna nursing home had been granted permission to sell Riccardo’s wares (after he had passed the hundred mark, there was quite the formidable uptick in the value of his stock).

  While Riccardo had a wonderful work ethic and had accumulated a vast body of sculptures over the years, his persistence in living meant that the residential home had very little left to flog off in recent years. Naturally, they didn’t want their most famed resident to die over something as vulgar as pennies and pounds, but nor did they want him to outstay his welcome either.

  * * *

  After a short taxi journey had turned into a long taxi journey, thanks to the endless amount of pit-stops Sister Agatha demanded the driver take—all so that she could admire the splendid views of the lagoon that the west side of the charming island laid claim to—Lido’s latest arrival finally sauntered into the reception area of the Stella della Laguna nursing home.