The Girl of his Dreams

'What is it he's thinking of doing?' Brunetti finally asked.

'Selling his apartment.'

Brunetti knew his fellow Venetians were considered a house-proud people, but he was not aware that it had been made a crime to sell one. Well, not unless it did not belong to you, that is.

He decided to interrupt Antonin here, or this back and forth could continue for more time than he would have patience for. 'Before we go on with this, perhaps you could tell me if this sale or anything to do with it is aiminal?'

Antonin gave this some thought before he answered, 'Not strictly, no.'

'I've no idea what that means.'

'Of course, of course. It's his apartment, so he has the legal right to sell it’

'Legal?' Brunetti asked, picking up on the priest's emphasis of the word.

'He inherited it from his uncle eight years ago, when he was twenty. He lives there with his companion and their daughter.' 'Is it his or theirs?'

'His. She moved in with him six years ago, but the apartment is in his name.'

'But they're not married?' Brunetti assumed they were not, but it would be better to get this clear.

'No.'

'Does she have residence at the address where they're living?'

'No,' Antonin said reluctantly. 'Why?'

'It's complicated,' the priest said. 'Most things are. Why not?'

'Well, the apartment where she was living with her parents belongs to IRE, and when her parents moved to Brescia, the contract passed to her, and she was allowed to stay there because she was unemployed and had a child.'

'How long ago did her parents move?' 'Two years ago.'

'When she was already living with this man?' 'Yes.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said neutrally. The houses and apartments owned and administered by IRE were supposed to be rented to the residents of Venice most in need of financial aid, but over the decades many of those people had turned out to be lawyers, architects, members of the city administration, or people who were related to employees of the public entity itself. Not only that, but many people who rented the apartments, often for derisory rents, managed to sublet them at a considerable profit. 'So she doesn't live there?'

'No’ the priest answered. 'Who does?'

'Some people she knows’ the priest answered. 'But the lease is still in her name?' 'I think so, yes.'

'You think so or you know so?' Brunetti enquired mildly.

Antonin could not disguise his irritation and snapped, 'They're friends, and they needed a place to live.'

Brunetti stopped himself from observing that, though this was a need common to most people, it was not generally answered by the chance to live in an apartment owned by IRE. He chose, instead, to ask more directly, 'Are they paying rent?'

‘I think so.'

Brunetti took a deep breath and was careful to make it audible. The priest quickly added, 'Yes, they are.'

What people earned at the expense of the city was not his concern, but it was always useful to know how they did so.

As if sensing a truce, Antonin said, 'But that's not the problem. As I told you, it's that he wants to sell his apartment’

'Why?'

'That's it, you see’ the priest said. 'He wants to sell it to give the money to someone.'

Brunetti immediately thought of usurers, gambling debts. 'To whom?' he asked.

'To some charlatan from Umbria who's convinced him that he's his father’ Brunetti was about to ask if there were any reason the young man should believe this when the priest added, 'His spiritual father, that is.'

Brunetti lived with a woman whose chief weapons were irony and, when escalation was forced upon her, sarcasm; over the years he had noticed his own increasing tendency to dip into the same arsenal. Thus he consciously restrained himself and asked only, 'Is this man a cleric of some kind?'

Antonin brushed the question aside. ‘I don't know, though he presents himself as one. He's a swindler, that's what he is, who's convinced Roberto that he – this swindler – has some sort of direct line to heaven.'

Whatever Geneva Convention still governed this conversation went unviolated by Brunetti, who did not point out that many of Antonin's fellow priests made a similar claim to that same direct line. Brunetti moved back in his chair and crossed his legs. There was something surreal in the scene, Brunetti realized, just as he knew that his sense of the absurd was acute enough to allow him to appreciate it. The priest's moral compass might not register a tremor at fraud committed against the city, but it was sensitive enough to be set atremble by the thought of money going to a belief system different from his own. Brunetti wanted to lean forward and ask the priest just how a person was meant to judge true belief from false, but he thought it wiser to wait and see what Antonin had to say. He worked to keep his face bland and thought that he succeeded.

'He met him about a year ago’ Antonin continued, leaving it to Brunetti to work out the identity of the pronouns. 'He – Roberto, my friend Patrizia's son -was already mixed up with one of those Catecumeni groups.'

'Like the one at Santi Apostoli?' Brunetti asked neutrally, mentioning a church which was used for meetings of a group of particularly unbuttoned Christians:

Brunetti, who sometimes walked past as the sound of their evening services emerged, could think of no better adjective.

'In the city, but not that group,' Antonin said.

'Was this other man also a member?' Brunetti asked.

'I don't know,' Antonin said quickly, as though this were an irrelevant detail. 'But what I do know is that, within a month of their meeting, Roberto was already giving him money.'

'Would you tell me how you know this?' Brunetti asked.

'Patrizia told me.'

'And how did she know?'

'Her son's companion, Emanuela, told her.'

'And did she know because there was some sort of decline in the family's finances?' Brunetti asked, wondering why the man couldn't simply tell him what was going on and have done with it. Why did he wait for these repeated, minute questions? The memory flashed into Brunetti's mind of the last confession he had made, when he was about twelve. As he counted out his poor, miserable little-boy sins to the priest, he had become conscious of a mounting eagerness in the priest's voice as he asked Brunetti to explain in detail just what he had done and what he had felt while doing it. And an atavistic warning of the presence of something unhealthy and dangerous had sounded in Brunetti's mind, driving him to excuse himself and leave the confessional, never again to return.

And here he was, decades later, in a parody of that same situation, though this time it was he who was asking the niggling questions. His mind wandered off to a consideration of the concept of sin and the way it forced people to divide action into good or bad, right or wrong, forcing them to live in a black and white universe.

He had not wanted to provide his own children with a list of sins that had to be mindlessly avoided and rules that could never be questioned. Instead, he had tried to explain to them how some actions produced good and some bad, though he had been forced at times to regret that he had not chosen the other option with its easy resolution of every question.

'… He's put it on the market. I told you: he says he wants to give the community the money and go and live with them.'

'Yes, I understand that,' Brunetti lied. 'But when? What happens to this woman Emanuela? And their daughter?'

'Patrizia has said that they can go and live with her -she owns her own apartment – but it's small, only three rooms, and four people can't live in it, at least not for very long.'

'Isn't there anywhere else?' Brunetti asked, thinking of the apartment that belonged to IRE and the lease that was now in this woman Emanuela's name.

'No, not without creating terrible problems,' the priest said, offering no explanation.