The Death of Faith (23 page)

‘Well,’ she said, attention on the knife, ‘today he was talking about how God is our father and when he was talking about God, he kept saying “He” and “Him”. So I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn’t have a body, wasn’t material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn’t have a body or anything.’

Brunetti glanced across Chiara’s lowered head, but he was too late and there was no trace of a smile of triumph on Paola’s face. ‘So what did Padre Luciano say?’

‘Oh, he got mad and yelled at me. Said I was showing off.’ She looked up at Brunetti, the apple momentarily forgotten. ‘But I wasn’t,
Papà.
I wasn’t showing off at all. I really wanted to know. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, God can’t be both things, can—’ Chiara caught herself before using the questionable pronoun and asked instead, ‘Can it be like that?’

‘I don’t know, angel, it’s been a long time since I studied that stuff. I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God’s so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don’t mean anything to God. You ever think of that?’

‘No, I never did,’ she said, pushing her plate away. She considered it for a while, then said, ‘I suppose it’s possible.’ Another speculative silence. ‘Can I go and do my homework now?’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, leaning over to ruffle her hair. ‘If you have any trouble with your maths problems, the really hard ones, just bring them right to me.’

‘And what will you do,
Papà,
tell me how you can’t help because maths is so different from when you went to school?’ Chiara asked with a laugh.

‘Isn’t that what I always do with your maths homework,
cara?’

‘Yes. I suppose it’s the only thing you can do, huh?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Brunetti said, pushing back his chair.

* * * *

Chapter Thirteen

Prompted by the theme of religion that he seemed unable to prevent from invading both his personal and his professional life, Brunetti that night devoted himself to the reading of the early Church Fathers, a form of entertainment to which he was not much given. He began with Tertulian but found that his immediate dislike for that man’s rantings drove him to consult the writings of Saint Benedict. But then he came upon a passage declaring that, ‘The husband who, transported by immoderate love, has intercourse with his wife so ardently in order to satisfy his passion that even had she not been his wife, he would have wished to have commerce with her, is committing a sin.’

‘Commerce?’ Brunetti asked himself aloud, looking up from the page and managing to startle Paola, who sat beside him, half asleep over the notes for the class she was to give the next day.

‘Humm?’ she asked in mild interrogation.

‘We really let these people educate our children?’ he asked and then read the passage out to her.

He felt, rather than saw, her shrug. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked.

‘It means that, if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can’t have sex, he’s going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that’s just asking for trouble. In a way, it’s like having a blind person teach Art History, isn’t it?’

‘Why haven’t you ever said any of this to me?’ he asked.

‘We made a deal. I promised that I would never interfere with the religious education of the children.’

‘But this is lunacy,’ he said, pounding his hand down on the open pages of the book.

‘Of course it’s lunacy,’ she replied in an entirely calm voice. ‘But is it any more lunatic than most of what they see or read?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Madonna. Sex clubs, phone sex. You name it, it’s just the other side of the coin to the maniac who wrote that,’ she said, pointing dismissively to the book in his hands. ‘In either case, sex becomes an obsession.’ She turned her attention back to her notes.

After a few moments, Brunetti said, ‘But,’ and then stopped until she looked up at him. When he saw that he had her attention, he repeated, ‘But do they really tell them things like this?’

‘I told you, Guido, I leave all of that to you. It was you who insisted that they needed to learn about — if I recall your precise phrase — “Western Culture”. Well, Saint Benedict — if it is he from whom that particularly infelicitous passage comes — Saint Benedict is part of Western Culture.’

‘But they can’t teach them this,’ he insisted.

She shrugged. ‘Ask Chiara,’ she said and bent back over her notes.

Left alone to his fulminations, Brunetti resolved to do just that the following day. He closed the book, set it aside, and pulled another from the stack on the floor beside the sofa. He settled in with Josephus’s
History of the Jewish War
and had just got to the description of the Emperor Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem when the phone rang.

He reached across to the small table beside him and picked up the receiver. ‘Brunetti,’ he said.

‘Sir, this is Miotti.’

‘Yes, Miotti, what is it?’

‘I thought I should call you, sir.’

‘What for, Miotti?’

‘One of those people you and Vianello went to see has died, sir. I’m there now.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Signor da Prè.’

‘What happened?’

‘We aren’t sure.’

‘What do you mean, you aren’t sure?’

‘Maybe you’d better come and have a look, sir.’

‘Where are you?’

‘We’re at his home, sir. It’s at—’

Brunetti cut him off. ‘I know where it is. What happened?’

‘Water started to come through the ceiling into the apartment below him, so the neighbour went up to see what was wrong. He had a key, so he let himself in, and he found da Prè on the floor of the bathroom.’

‘And?’

‘It looks like he fell and broke his neck, sir.’

Brunetti waited for further explanation, but when none was forthcoming, he said, ‘Call Dottor Rizzardi.’

‘I’ve already done that, sir.’

‘Good. I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.’ Brunetti hung up and turned to Paola, who was no longer reading but curious to learn the other half of the conversation she had just overheard. ‘Da Prè. He fell and broke his neck.’

‘The little hunchback?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor man, what rotten luck,’ was her immediate response.

Brunetti’s took longer to come and, when it did, reflected the difference in both their dispositions and their professions. ‘Perhaps.’

Paola ignored this and looked down at her watch. ‘It’s almost eleven.’

Brunetti dropped Josephus on top of St Benedict and got to his feet. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’

Paola touched the back of his hand. ‘Wear a scarf, Guido. It’s cold tonight.’

He bent down and kissed the top of her head, got his coat, remembered to take his scarf, and left the house.

When he got to da Prè’s address, he found a uniformed policeman standing across the street from the front door. Recognizing Brunetti, the officer saluted and, in response to his question, told him that Dr Rizzardi had already arrived.

Upstairs, another uniformed officer, Corsaro, stood just inside the open door of the apartment. He saluted Brunetti and stepped aside. ‘Dottor Rizzardi is inside, sir.’

Brunetti entered and went toward the back of the apartment, from which both light and male voices emerged. He entered what must be the bedroom and saw a low bed, almost as small as a child’s crib, against the wall. As he started across the room, he stepped into something soft and liquid. Immediately he stopped in his tracks and called out, ‘Miotti!’

In an instant, the young officer appeared at a door on the far side of the room. ‘What is it, sir?’

‘Switch on the light.’

Miotti did that, and Brunetti looked down at his feet, vainly attempting to stifle an irrational fear that he was standing in blood. He breathed with relief when he saw that it was nothing more than a carpet soaked with the water that had flowed through the open door of the bathroom. Seeing this, he continued across the room and stopped at the lighted doorway, from which came the sounds of human motion.

Stepping inside, he saw Dr Rizzardi bent, as he had seen him too many times, over the supine body of a dead man.

Hearing the noise behind him, Dr Rizzardi got to his feet. He extended his hand, then paused to remove the thin rubber glove that covered it. Extending it anew, he said, ‘
Buona sera,
Guido.’ He didn’t smile, and even if he had, it would not have made much difference in the austere severity of his face. Too long an exposure to violent death in all its forms had honed away the flesh from nose and cheeks, as if his face were made of marble, and each death had chipped away yet another minuscule fragment.

Rizzardi stepped aside, allowing Brunetti to see the tiny body that lay below them. Grown even smaller in death, Da Prè seemed to lie beneath the feet of giants. He lay on his back, his head tilted wildly to one side but not touching the ground, as though he were some sort of clothed turtle that had been flipped over and abandoned on his shell by wanton boys.

‘What happened?’ Brunetti asked. As he spoke, he noticed that the legs of Rizzardi’s trousers were soaked from the knee to the cuff and that his own shoes were growing damp from standing in the half centimetre of water that covered the floor all around them.

‘It looks like he turned on the water for his bath and then slipped on the floor.’ Brunetti looked. The tub was empty, the water no longer running. A round black rubber plug stood on the side of the tub.

Brunetti looked down again at the dead man. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but he wore no shoes or socks. ‘Slipped on the tile in his bare feet?’ he asked.

‘Looks that way,’ Rizzardi answered.

Brunetti backed out of the bathroom, and Rizzardi, his work finished, followed him. Brunetti looked around the bedroom, though he had no idea what he was looking for. He saw three windows, curtains drawn against the night, a few paintings on the walls, looking as though they’d been put there decades ago and never again noticed. The rug was a thick old Persian tribal, sodden now and colours dulled. A red silk dressing gown lay across the foot of the bed, and beneath it, just beyond the point where the water had reached, Brunetti saw da Prè’s tiny shoes placed neatly side by side, his dark socks folded and laid on top of them.

Brunetti crossed the room, bent down, and picked up the shoes. Holding the socks in one hand, he turned the shoes over and looked at the soles. The black rubber of the heels and soles was shiny and bright, as is often the case with shoes that are worn only inside the house. The only sign of wear were two grey scuff marks on the outer edges of the heels. He set the shoes down and replaced the tiny socks back across them.

‘I’ve never seen anyone die this way,’ Rizzardi said.

‘Wasn’t there a movie or something, years ago, about someone with that disease that makes you look like an elephant? Didn’t he die like that?’

Rizzardi shook his head. ‘I never saw it. I’ve read about things like this, at least about the danger of a fall for people like this. But usually all they do is break their vertebrae.’ Rizzardi stopped and glanced away, and Brunetti waited, assuming that he was casting his memory back through the medical literature. After a few moments, Rizzardi said, ‘No, I’m wrong. It has happened. Not often, but it’s happened.’